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December 27, 2006

Interesting Timing: TailRank Launches Video Today Too

Michael Arrington

32 comments »

TailRank and competitor Megite are fighting for second place behind blog news leader, TechMeme. It’s not surprising that both companies are expanding into ranking popular videos, too. But it’s surprising that both companies launched their products on the same day. We covered Megite earlier, and then received an email from TailRank founder Kevin Burton that they have just launched their product as well.

The basic idea is the same - TailRank is analyzing videos that blogs link to and embed on their sites, and then determine what videos are popular based on the aggregate weighted statistics. Bigger blogs get more weight, but smaller blogs get a vote, too.

Competition is a great thing, and these companies are competing hard. Megite even recently took a swipe at TailRank based on recent Alexa stats, here. As to video, which product is better? Well, they look about the same, although I give a slight nudge to Megite based on on the interface, which shows more videos on a page.

  • Sphere It

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 27th, 2006 at 1:26 am 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. IndianPad

    December 27th, 2006 at 5:33 am

  2. Tailrank and Megite add video search; Alexa still sucks at franticindustries - web 2.0, social networking, IT technology trends.

    December 27th, 2006 at 10:51 am

  3. TechCrunch Japanese アーカイブ » 偶然のタイミング？TailRankも動画ランキングを本日ローンチ

    December 27th, 2006 at 11:08 am

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  1. Kevin Burton

    December 27th, 2006 at 1:34 am

    Second place? I’d say we were first place across the board ;)

    Also…. WRT alexa stats. Not only is it a bad idea to use them to begin with but probably not a good idea to use an old blog post referencing the data which was incorrect in the first place.

    As I noted here:

    http://open.typepad.com/open/2.....rs_in.html

    …

    First you made the mistake of trusting Alexa or even referencing them. Their traffic is amazingly unreliable. It isn’t even comparing apples to oranges anymore. More like apples to elephants.

    Second. Even if you do assume that Alexa is 100% accurate daily spikes/fluctuations are normal within Alexa’s data.

    For example if you go back to Alexa right now they’ve corrected this and Tailrank is now beating Megite again.

    No story here.

    Third. Back to the Alexa problem. They’re showing Tailrank as flat all across the board. This is simply incorrect as we’re seeing traffic increase from 50-100% each month.

    Long story short things are going amazingly well :)

    I should also note that Tailrank was the first memetracker that shipped personalized recommendations with OPML import in the “My Tail” feature. This was available long before Megite offered it.

    And thanks for using the Tailrank tag. It’s hard to keep track of posts which just link to us vs are actually talking about our product.

    Onward!

  2. Kevin Burton

    December 27th, 2006 at 1:37 am

    Also note that Alexa shows most of the memetrackers/memediggers are flatline across the board:

    http://www.alexaholic.com/megi.....reddit.com

    Just not worty citing these numbers anymore…

  3. Michael Arrington

    December 27th, 2006 at 1:42 am

    Kevin:

    I couldn’t care less about the actual alexa stats. I just think it’s funny that they wrote a blog post saying that they’d caught up with you. :-)

  4. Kevin Burton

    December 27th, 2006 at 1:43 am

    Ha….. fair enough :) I guess as a stats geek I just had to comment :)

  5. Alaska Miller

    December 27th, 2006 at 1:45 am

    A lot of people knock Alexa but fail to remember Alexa is the best we’ve got thus far without people literally revealing their data themselves.

  6. Kevin Burton

    December 27th, 2006 at 2:03 am

    Alaska,

    The problem is that it’s not much better than a random number generator ;)

    The numbers can often be WAY off….

  7. John Wehr

    December 27th, 2006 at 2:18 am

    Disclosure: I’m a Tailrank adviser.

    Outside of the notoriously unreliable Alexa statistics, TechMeme is not the front-runner.

    Compete.com:
    Tailrank - 130,794 people
    Techmeme - 2,968 people
    Megite - 12,784 people
    http://snapshot.compete.com/te.....megite.com

    Technorati:
    Tailrank - 58,496 links
    Techmeme - 8,202 links
    Megite - 2,893 links
    http://technorati.com/search/tailrank.com
    http://technorati.com/search/techmeme.com
    http://technorati.com/search/megite.com

    Google:
    Tailrank - 618,000 links
    Techmeme - 86,200 links
    Megite - 119,000 links
    http://www.google.com/search?q.....=firefox-a
    http://www.google.com/search?q.....=firefox-a
    http://www.google.com/search?q.....=firefox-a

    URLFan:
    Tailrank - Ranks 1150
    Techmeme - Ranks 3997
    Megite - Ranks 4119
    http://www.urlfan.com/site/tai.....61780.html
    http://www.urlfan.com/site/tec.....63874.html
    http://www.urlfan.com/site/megite_com/158932.html

    I’d welcome additional data anyone has to offer, and I’d like to hear more about why Mike considers TechMeme the leader. Whatever metrics we use, all three sites are great and innovative in their own way.

  8. Pramit Singh

    December 27th, 2006 at 3:22 am

    It is interesting, what TailRank and Megite are doing. However, I think Techmeme has scored over them by covering fewer news items and news sources. Besides, Digg is already ahead in Videos.

  9. matthew

    December 27th, 2006 at 5:09 am

    I am a humble man. I believe if we can all make our users happy, we are all the winners. In fact nobody cares who is No.1, all our users care about whether we provide the on-target and useful info to them.

  10. web 2 point oh

    December 27th, 2006 at 5:29 am

    Maybe we should post negativity // trash in this post like Kevin Burton seems to do against various other companies.

    I don’t see what all the fuss is about with Tailrank

    Good luck megite (whoever you are ;)

  11. Adrian Keys

    December 27th, 2006 at 6:21 am

    “I’d welcome additional data anyone has to offer, and I’d like to hear more about why Mike considers TechMeme the leader. Whatever metrics we use, all three sites are great and innovative in their own way. ” - John

    The metrics speak for themselves…but its obvious that many people have their own preferences and/or are being influenced by news they have heard about the niche in the past.

    I agree with Matthew..

    “I believe if we can all make our users happy, we are all the winners. In fact nobody cares who is No.1, all our users care about whether we provide the on-target and useful info to them.”

    http://www.jollyjo.org

  12. Idolpost

    December 27th, 2006 at 6:57 am

    Let’s keep rolling new video sites. It’s never ending list of Video for every niche of the market. By the end of next year, there might be 500,000 video sharing and ranking sites. :)

    http://www.idolpost.com/

  13. franticindustries

    December 27th, 2006 at 7:16 am

    I also once made the mistake of using Alexa for analysis. But later I did some research on Alexa, which you can find on my site, and I came to the conclusion that Alexa traffic rankings are so completely wrong they can’t be used even as a remote indicator of the real traffic rankings of websites.

  14. Chris

    December 27th, 2006 at 8:14 am

    Somewhat related question - HOW DO I STOP the SNAP pop-up preview boxes????

  15. Chris

    December 27th, 2006 at 8:16 am

    Oops, now how do I delete my previous post since I just figured out how to disable those hideously annoying little previews. Carry on.

  16. Greg Linden

    December 27th, 2006 at 8:51 am

    Shameless self-promotion, but I would like to mention that Findory launched a video section a few months ago. You can find it at

    http://findory.com/video

    Findory Video recommends videos based on what you watch. For example, if you watch a couple of anime shorts through Findory Video, Findory will recommend anime shorts and other related videos you might like.

    The videos on Findory Video are indexed from Google Video, YouTube, and a few other places.

    It’s also worth mentioning StumbleUpon’s new video site:

    http://video.stumbleupon.com/

    It also recommends videos you might like. It has a very nice UI with the videos conveniently embedded in the page.

  17. john

    December 27th, 2006 at 9:39 am

    Tailrank blows. Techmeme is way better.

  18. Dave

    December 27th, 2006 at 10:50 am

    Personally, I find tag clouds easier to use since you see what is hot all at once. These site are nothing but scroll and read and scroll!

  19. Patricia

    December 27th, 2006 at 10:56 am

    @Matthew, I agree. Online traffic stats are unreliable no matter how much people want to say that they’re not and with ajax and video, it’s going to be all the more difficult. Either way, it’s a mistake to underestimate the value of the precise target and overlook smaller traffic sites that offer it. In my opinion, big numbers mean very little if only a tiny percentage of it notices or finds value in your company.

  20. Gabe

    December 27th, 2006 at 12:05 pm

    John Wehr,

    Probably what Mike meant is that more people actually use Techmeme than Tailrank. I notice none of the stats you showed have much to do with actual users. They have alot to do with links, and Tailrank does pretty well there. Why? Earlier this year, “Add to Tailrank” buttons started appearing alongside “Add to Digg” and “Add to del.ico.us” buttons on blogs, and the result is thousands of links to Tailrank from people who don’t use Tailrank or sometimes don’t even remember what Tailrank is. All those links help Google placement too. I suspect Tailrank gets thousands of hits a day from Google for people looking for primary documents on topics like Britney Spears. Finding an aggregator, those people tend to leave quickly and never return.

    Public user stats are unavailable, but one public proxy for return users is subscriptions on Bloglines:

    Tailrank front page
    http://www.bloglines.com/preview?siteid=4018255
    134 subscribers

    Tailrank tech page
    http://www.bloglines.com/preview?siteid=4969982
    55 subscribers

    Techmeme
    http://www.bloglines.com/preview?siteid=5476355
    3,479 subscribers

    Most bloggers I know quote a simliar huge imbalance in referrals from Techmeme vs. Tailrank. (Are any bloggers still reading this comment thread? Want to chime in?)

    Honestly, I feel a little silly even making this case. The idea that there’s a robust industry of “memetrackers” seems to be a blog-fueled fantasy. All these sites are smaller than TechCrunch (nevermind Digg) by every metric that matters. IMO, only one has respectable traction, and that one can definitely use a lot of improvement in 2007.

  21. Michael Arrington

    December 27th, 2006 at 1:05 pm

    Meme Fight!

  22. Kevin Burton

    December 27th, 2006 at 5:18 pm

    To be honest at the end of the day beating reddit, techmeme, and megite isn’t my goal.

    I’m trying to destroy Techcrunch!

    Just joking of course…… :)

    That said, I’m obviously eyeing a much larger market ..

  23. Michael Arrington

    December 27th, 2006 at 6:40 pm

    Nice, I like how you threw reddit in there as a comp for TailRank.

  24. Matthew

    December 27th, 2006 at 6:55 pm

    Have to agree with Gabe, those “Add to Tailrank” links make tailrank look fabulous. Try to search “tailrank” on technorati, you almost get nothing useful except those “add to tailrank” blogs.

  25. John Wehr

    December 27th, 2006 at 9:47 pm

    Like other metrics, Bloglines’ subscription counts are subject to sampling errors. A blogger heavy, tech oriented crowd is more likely to subscribe to an RSS feed or use the Alexa toolbar. Along the same lines, TechMeme is more likely to direct traffic to bloggers than major news sources. Judging by the normalized compete.com visitor count and pages/visit statistics ( http://snapshot.compete.com/te.....megite.com ) I’m not sure which site Gabe was talking about when he said, “only one has respectable traction.”

    http://compete.com/help#snp2

  26. Gabe

    December 28th, 2006 at 8:44 pm

    John, Tailrank very much tries to cater to the tech oriented crowd. E.g., there’s that tech.tailrank.com site (which has 55 subscribers). And remember, you’re commenting on a *Tech*Crunch post about Tailrank.

    So what sampling error would explain a 25:1 imbalance between subscribers? Is it possible people just don’t want to subscribe to Tailrank as much?

    Really, this is seriously lame. Comments on blogs won’t help Tailrank raise money or gain users.

  27. John Wehr

    December 28th, 2006 at 9:50 pm

    Not sure where you’re going with that Gabe, I have no hidden agenda. I took issue with Mike’s assertion that TechMeme is the “leader” given a number of metrics that indicate otherwise.

  28. Kevin Burton

    December 28th, 2006 at 11:19 pm

    Yeah.. the Technorati thing sucks….. It means I can’t track Tailrank conversations because the widgets overwhelm. This is Technorati’s fault of course not ours….

    Tags work well but people don’t always use tags… ug…. Links fail because a lot of people link to the site for the meme URL.

    Fun.

  29. Michael Arrington

    December 29th, 2006 at 2:50 am

    What I love best about this is that only John, Kevin, Gabe and I are still reading these comments.

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