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February 12, 2006

The Web 2.0 “Stock” Market

Michael Arrington

29 comments »

If you have a few minutes to kill, check out Alexadex, a marketplace for web sites. You get $10,000 to start. Prices are based on the alexa ranking for the sites you are buying or selling.

Welcome to the alexadex, where players compete for fame and glory by buying and selling shares in sites on the world wide web. The price of a share is set at the site’s daily reach per million, according to alexa.com. You get $10,000 just for signing up, so get started!

My strategy: I plan on buying shares of companies just before I write about them, and selling quickly afterwards. My first purchase was Alexadex.com.

I love stuff like this. Ok, back to real business.

I highly recommend buying dabble.com. hint, hint.

  • Sphere It

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 12th, 2006 at 8:18 pm and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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  1. NoosFactory » Blog Archive » Web20 stock market

    February 13th, 2006 at 9:54 am

  2. Free Hogg » Blog Archive » alexadex is really fun.

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    March 6th, 2006 at 3:29 am

  4. Web 2.0 - Что нового? » Blog Archive » Trendio - Делаем ставки на новости

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Comments

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  1. Srinivasan

    February 12th, 2006 at 8:26 pm

    Well, if it functions right, it will be a good place for popularity measure - thats definitely valuable.

    We have a concept for Web2.0 Companies, but no marketplace stuff. http://www.web20milliondollarhomepage.com. The idea is to make a compendium of web2.0 companies, in Pixels. Its just a simple modification of Alex Tew’s MDHP.

  2. Serge

    February 12th, 2006 at 8:32 pm

    Nice placement of the referral link there, . What a way to make money on the side…

  3. Michael Arrington

    February 12th, 2006 at 8:37 pm

    yeah, well, the “referral fee” is $1000 in play money, so I don’t feel that bad. :-)

  4. Thomas Manning

    February 12th, 2006 at 8:44 pm

    I wonder how many other people will also adobt your strategy, buying stock as soon as they see it listed on your site.

    This alone will drive the price up.

    Your pockets are going to be bursting with virtual $ :)

  5. Michael Arrington

    February 12th, 2006 at 8:46 pm

    Yeah, but since alexa lags by a day it seems like monitoring digg and slashdot is the way to go.

  6. Derek van Vliet

    February 12th, 2006 at 8:53 pm

    Curses! You’ll ruin my strategy of buying every domain you write about *after* you write about them!

  7. Michael Arrington

    February 12th, 2006 at 8:54 pm

    Yes, see, I have insider knowledge and plan to use it for evil purposes.

  8. Jason L. Baptiste

    February 12th, 2006 at 8:55 pm

    ahh, wow, talk about irony. I signed up about four hours ago. Main strategy, buy up shares of companies RIGHT after michael and others write about them. Alexa rankings aren’t instant, but updated daily. Michael, the fact that you posted a referral links, means you’ll be quite the rich Alexadex trader. Now, imagine if someone bought zillow at say $5 two weeks ago.

    -Jason L. Baptiste

  9. Michael Arrington

    February 12th, 2006 at 8:59 pm

    If anyone would like to know who I am writing about next, just paypal me $1000 in real money.

    Note: I’m fucking kidding.

  10. Nik Cubrilovic

    February 12th, 2006 at 9:22 pm

    Mike after the FON incident where bloggers were not disclosing their interests i find it absolutely disgusting that you have included a referral link here that gets you $1k per link and not disclosed it! bad arrington bad bad bad! :-)

  11. CetaMac

    February 12th, 2006 at 9:52 pm

    “Prices are based on the alexa ranking for the sites you are buying or selling.” Then what the alexa rank according to?

  12. Jennifer

    February 12th, 2006 at 9:55 pm

    I’m bullish on Eurekster. But, what’s the point of this game?

  13. bjtitus

    February 12th, 2006 at 10:13 pm

    Hmmm. Dabble, the video bookmarking service. It sounds pretty cool. I’m just waiting for all of this bookmarking stuff to get integrated into an easy to use interface. I like del.icio.us and such, with the ease of bookmarks. I am not too fond of their page though (I’m not too good of a tagger :P ).

    I wish you well on your “investing”.

  14. Shrikant Joshi

    February 12th, 2006 at 11:01 pm

    Anybody heard of “Yahoo! Buzz Game“?

    Waste of time, if you ask me, personally.

    :)

    Shrikant Joshi

  15. Michael Arrington

    February 12th, 2006 at 11:50 pm

    Shrikant, I think that’s cool (just checked it out), but alexadex is much easier to manipulate, and therefore more fun. :-)

  16. Kevin Burton

    February 13th, 2006 at 12:35 am

    Buy TailRank dude.. seriously… our numbers on Alexa sure is purty.

    Kevin

  17. seocase

    February 13th, 2006 at 1:41 am

    If its easier to manipulate then it cannot be a good benchmark of web 2.0 websites.

  18. Derek van Vliet

    February 13th, 2006 at 6:12 am

    Perhaps instead of playing from now on i’ll just keep an eye on the ‘techcrunch’ account. That will basically be the equivalent of what my account used to be :)

  19. Chris Yeh

    February 13th, 2006 at 7:10 am

    Watch out for Eliot Spitzer…I hear you’re in his crosshairs now.

  20. Alexa Smith

    February 13th, 2006 at 9:08 am

    Man, I love my name :-)

  21. Alex

    February 13th, 2006 at 9:02 pm

    I’ll give it a try. Out of curiosity, would my little programming venture http://www.fallofnations.com/ be considered Web2.0? It came before all this Web2.0 buzz, but it seems to act upon some of its principles, mainly that of being powered by users.

  22. jldugger

    February 13th, 2006 at 11:02 pm

    Seems like a silly concept. It won’t be a good measure of “popularity.” What it could possibly measure is future expectations of alexa ratings. Meaning if alexa does correlate with popularity then the price could reflect expectations of future popularity.

    However, there’s a critical aspect missing from the future’s market: half of every transaction is an unwilling participant at a fixed price. If I divest myself of all shares of say, yahoo, the price doesn’t fall. Similarly, if I move from an even weighted average of every website ever (is that possible?) to a concentrated holding in a site that just got flash-crowded or something, the price won’t go up because the computer simply accepts all trades. So rather than obtaining information from the price of a share we really only have the number of people invested in a particular site and for how much. In a futures market experiment, we’re really interested in the market as a whole rather than a few very successful players. In fact, because price doesn’t fluxuate, we can’t even predict future values easily.

    Because it’s play money that players have no commitment or connection to, anyone who falls below the starting amount can always start a new account. These factors can lead to people pursuing high risk high payout scenarios they wouldn’t otherwise take.And of course, there’s the pump n dump schemes like everyone’s considering here ;). Fortunately there’s no real incentive to win aside from having a link to your website relatively close to the homepage.

    But if you’re really interested in futures markets and the web, it might be best to understand a basic one like the Iowa Futures Market. It’s real money but the minimum investment is only 5 dollars. One could imagine that a futures contract based on alexa ratings quite easily, although I doubt they have either the incentive or the man/computer power to do anything exhaustive in the area.

    Yahoo! Buzz game seems interesting, but to me at least, these sorts of “predict the next internet meme before it happens!” are only interesting when you don’t already have a reliable measurement tool (such as alexa or slashdot’s “Mysterious Future”). It doesn’t help that people can generally make a ton of ‘profit’ out of the difference between what alexa said happened yesterday and what everyone can see happening today.

  23. Bond Girl

    June 16th, 2006 at 3:28 pm

    Alexadex has been down for the past 60 hours (or more, that’s the last time I tried to access my account). The cryptic message reads “Gone fishing. The alexadex is down for a planned outage. Please check back in 15 minutes or so.”

    Since 60 hours exceeded 15 minutes by a wide margin, I came up with some new ad copy tag lines for Alexadex to freely use as they see fit.

    “Gone Bone fishing on Christmas Island, then exploring the sex lives of cannibals in the equatorial pacific.”

    “Gone to frolick with spider monkeys off of St. Barts.”

    “Gone to Havana, Cuba, Hemingway style, adrift at sea chasing a big fish.”

    “Gone to get smashed and dance in bubbles in Ibiza.”

    “Gone shopping in Paris on Rue du Faubourg St. Honore.”

    “Gone fishing with Snoop, who started smoking again. What was the name of my web site again?”

    “Gone, just f-in’ gone on a Bender.”

    “Gone to do Ashtanga yoga Pattabhi Jois style in India.”

  24. Harish Keshwani

    July 18th, 2006 at 10:10 pm

    Michael, what a coincidence, I am reading this post for the first time today but few days back I had written an article about Future of TechCrunch which included Web 2.0 stock market.

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