Quantifying SiteFinder Traffic

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Quantifying SiteFinder Traffic

	By Benjamin Edelman Assistant Professor, Harvard Business School
	September 20, 2003 Views: 41,716 Comments: 2

Want a sense of just how much traffic VeriSign is receiving from its SiteFinder service? Alexa, with its Alexa Toolbar and associated traffic tracking services, makes it easy to find out:

Alexa analysis of VeriSign traffic

The Highlights:

Over the past three months, taken as a whole, VeriSign had traffic rank 1,559. But today its traffic rank is 19—meaning, at least among Alexa users (who are generally representative of web users), the verisign.com domain has suddenly joined the top 20 sites, measured by page views.

VeriSign’s climb is even more notable when reckoned in “reach”—proportion of users who visit the site at least once. Measured in this way, verisign.com is now in position 9—meaning there are only eight sites on the web that more users visit in a given day.

All that said, users don’t tend to stay on verisign.com for long. Notice page views rank of 45, far below the traffic rank, meaning that users tend to stay on other sites for a longer duration (more page views) than on verisign.com.

Ben Edelman
Berkman Center for Internet & Society
Harvard Law School

By Benjamin Edelman, Assistant Professor, Harvard Business School

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Comments

Benjamin Edelman – Sep 21, 2003 8:25 PM

Stewart Baker notes that, commensurate with VeriSign’s dramatic increase in rank, msn.com has fallen somewhat. At present, its drop can be seen in reach and in page views per user—confirming intuition that a large part of VeriSign’s new traffic comes at the expense of error message that would otherwise have been shown to Internet Explorer users via the designated pagse at MSN.

See Alexa analysis as to msn.com—drop in page views per user from 10.9 (1 week average) to 10.4 (“today”) and drop in reach from 236,450 to 230,000.

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Kai Xue – Sep 26, 2003 11:18 PM

Newest Nielsen Net Ratings number for this week:
http://www.nielsen-netratings.com/news.jsp?section=dat_to&country=us

Verisign has yet to pierce the top 10.

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