Statsaholic (formerly Alexaholic) launched a year ago and provided much easier access to Alexa traffic data than the Alexa site itself. Statsaholic also had other features Alexa didn’t offer, like embeddable graphs and data smoothing. Others agreed, and soon started linking to Statsaholic instead of Alexa when doing traffic comparisons. At one point, Alexa was the no. 3 search result on Google for “Alexa.”
Statsaholic was not using the Alexa web service to get the data, because Alexa doesn’t offer the graph data via their web service. Amazon, which owns Alexa, could have complained or simply shut them down when it launched, but they didn’t. They actually complimented the service in a post on the Alexa blog last April.
But somewhere along the line Amazon decided they didn’t like Statsaholic and got their lawyers involved. They filed a domain name dispute earlier this year to get ownership over the Alexaholic domain name. Ron Hornbaker, the owner of the service, stopped using the alexaholic domain name and moved the service over to Statsaholic.com while the dispute was ongoing.
That didn’t appease Amazon, which then took the step of blocking Statsaholic from accessing Alexa graphs, although they left other sites doing the same thing intact. Statsaholic started getting data in other ways, and eventually Amazon just turned off all ability to hot link to their graphs from any outside site.
Meanwhile, Amazon implemented many of the Statsaholic features and pushed the graphing function to the home page of the Alexa site.
The Statsaholic side of the story is here. I’ve been playing phone tag with Amazon PR to talk about this for over a week but have been unable to do anything other than swap emails and voicemails to try to schedule a time to talk. In their defense, they say they tried to work with Statsaholic, even going so far as to “explored an acquisition” before shutting them down.
What bothers me about the situation is that Amazon sat on it for a year, complimenting the service along the way (and copying it). Then, just when the service started getting really popular, they took drastic measures to shut it down.
I’ll continue to try to talk to Amazon about the situation, and there very well could be additional facts that put this in a different light. But for now we are left without a service that many of us used regularly for research, and Amazon looks like a bit of a bully.
in some ways it makes sense what amazon has done - at first alexaholic was a small site that was not going to affect them - so why bother closing them down - as it became more and more popular and starting taking traffic away from them - they then dealt with the issue.
Wether what Amazon did is correct or not is another matter that I dont have all the details on so will leave that alone : ) - but i have used both and find both good interfaces for different things
Its unfortunate, but this is always a possibility when you build a business model on an unreliable 3rd party API. Mashups are great, but there’s a danger that they’ll be swallowed up by the first party if they get too popular. This is one of the reasons its almost impossible to scale a company on the back of a public API - I’d much rather have a direct business model of selling my own product and/or ads.
I agree to Rob.
Even though Alexaholic came up with some good and fresh ideas, its whole business is still based on the data which is owned by Alexa/Amazon. And still the owner of this data should be allowed to decide if their data is used by someone else or not.
In the first place why did Alexa complement Alexaholic. Alexa must have clearly specified reservations in its terms and conditions for using its API. They didn’t do their home work before opening their API’s for public consumption. Now they are blaming Alexaholic. Alexaholic didn’t do anything unethical ( except probably the name). Alexaholic was developed by a web developer during a long week end. What if it was a half a million dollar project? I think it was largely a fault of Alexa. Alexa should compensate Alexaholic for all the trouble and agony.
This shows how terribly vulnerable any company who relies on widgets is.
Ultimately, stataholic didn’t survive, because since they didn’t innovate in any substantial way that created leverage, even although they had lot of ‘users’. That’s the risk Alexaholic were well aware of, and they blew it.
So do the widget companies have any chance of leverage over Myspace etc. no matter how many users they have?
“founding president” of Facebook? Sounds like he’s a great marketer too because he wasn’t one of the founders.
The thing abou this is, it’s not a mash up. Alexaholic is just reposting the chart images that Alexa creates. It’s a scrape and show more than a mashup based on freely available API’s. Don’t be fooled. It’s completely within Amazon’s rights to do this. All of this support for ‘Statsaholic’ is based on a misunderstanding of mashup/scrape issue.
charyut, consider this: Even if we’re talking about a public API, Amazon would still be “within their rights” to deny service. It’s never a good idea to build something atop an unstable base that could be pulled from you at the whim of a bigger fish.
This is the way the big fish eat the small fish. let the idea take roots , let it grow and when it is ready to bloom, just copy the idea and uproot the startup which dedicated itself to bring it up…
I don’t think there’s anything remotely unethical about complimenting them, that’s not a promise of eternal support. Is it not conceivable that they were impressed by it and said so? Maybe they spent the year looking into workable options outside of shutting them down.
I use the public API, for a long time you could get away with more than one query per second. Later, you couldn’t. Amazon probably didn’t spend time on the restrictions until later, but I still accepted the terms.
Statsaholic didn’t even do that, they based it on a scrape. Surprise, surprise, once Amazon exhausted other options they shut it down.
So if I were to scrape TC and leave out all the Ask JS and other extras for just a super-fast decoration and ad-free experience, you might not shut me down at first. If I got more popular, you might decide to work something out, and if I declined, i doubt you’d just leave it. But the fact that you didn’t shut it down the first time I scraped doesn’t preclude you from rightfully shutting me down at your whim. There’s nothing unethical about it.
Sites like this live on the edge, knowing any moment other site they are leaching off of or exploiting will shut them down. Similar to the discussion about Slide and RockYou living with respect to MySpace.
When they finally do get shutdown, it should be no surprise. In fact, everyday they do not get shutdown should be seen as a blessing !!
insightful graph of the involved domains themselves: http://www.alexa.com/data/deta.....=alexa.com
yeah when you own the data; its yours! …
- so don’t go building on others stuff ….
-
Well let me try both these sites.
http://www.tekno-world.blogspot.com
As a lawyer i would explore the option of a law suit. In case law the unhindered, continuous usage of, a property, (which easily extends to a service) with the knowing of the original party, (and support in this case) is called usage by es stopple. You have a case. Good luck.
There are clearly two sides to this story, with each party having their own merits…
I just hope lessons are learned from this case and that perhaps the originators of data services and APIs will really start to think about and adjust their policies accordingly to accommodate the new climate of the ‘Mashup’.
If this does not happen, it can only serve to slow innovation…
This is just a typical example of corporate perspective. Larger companies attempt to emulate the passion and transparency of a the community that uses their services. When they back peddle as Amazon has done, their true intentions show and their level of goodwill with the power users takes a hit. It turns into a David vs. Goliath battle where only the community can help sway the fight. It’s unfortunate for Ron, but hopefully Amazon will react to any backlash of the people in their future actions.
I think this is a cautionary tale for investors. Building a company that monetizes other people’s IP is something we have been talking about in relation to YouTube and the major media companies.
Because I work in the video world, I also think about AdBrite’s video wrapper, SplashCast’s video mash-up player and others. The problem comes when they use original material from another site and leave that site with all the costs, but none of the upside of hosting (and/or developing) the content.
I agree that sites who host the content should have clear policies on these issues, and I also think the legal issue from Norm (#15) is interesting and could have merit (though it will make people hate lawyers even more).
I think it’s time for Alexa to die. Their data was always dangerously misleading, and now they’re behaving evilly (in the Google sense) as well. If anyone wants to build a replacement for them, Y Combinator would be happy to fund it.
is amazon making money yet?
Hm…. I wonder if this is the type of behavior you should expect if you use EC2 or S3.
They get a little scared and decide to cut you off…….
Very strange.
I agree, it’s time for Alexa to go .
I wouldn’t trust a lawyer who couldn’t spell *estoppel* and who doesn’t seem to understand the basic concepts underlying property. For starters, services do not qualify as property, though the product of such labor *may* be property.
If Statsaholic had a contract with Amazon for access, they’d have a case. If they were attempting to adversely possess Amazon’s data, they’d have a case (but how that works for non-real property isn’t yet worked out).
If they just had a *license* then they don’t have a case, because licenses are revocable by the licensor UNLESS 1) they have a paid contract, or 2) they reasonably relied on a promise by the licensor of continued access to the data. HOWEVER, (2) doesn’t apply here because the Amazon license agreement specifically states that they can revoke the license at any time. HENCE, Statsaholic was voluntarily assuming the risk that Amazon could at any time terminate that license.
The terms of the license are the important bit. It doesn’t matter if usage is continuous under a license, because that’s presumed. It doesn’t matter if they received aid from Amazon, because they were under a license while Amazon was still okay with it.
Norm’s interpretation would mean that a service or data provider could never change or shut down their service simply because other people used it (without a contract).
Damn, Alexa can you do at least web 2.0 graphics?
I advice users never use alexa api!!! use other company’s api and kill destory their competition. It works.
This case has two HUGE sides to it. I tend to feel for the Statsaholic guy.
But like #18 (Michael Hoofman) has pointed out, sites that try to build a service or business model on other sites resources (hosting, data etc except open APIs) might have legal flips thrown at them.
Adbrite is one that I am very wary off. For a video site, its best you host yourself if you plan to make money out of the venture. Uploading to YouTube and monetizing from this will only make you vulnerable.
Start ups should not stoop so low and look as a leech. You what happens to them…
Mashups are dangerous, ha?
I hope Amazon guys aren’t angry with my small service.
btw: “and eventually Amazon just turned off all ability to hot link to their graphs from any outside site.”
I just checked out and it works at my service.
Amazon might “seem” like a bully, but I might consider this as simply protecting their rights. I think they do sell advertising around the pages that displays these stats and this “steals” from their revenue, albeit very little in the overall scheme of things.
If the Amazon TOS does allow this then I do have issues with them, otherwise, thats life.
@Eran (#26): they only blocked it on statsaholic.com, they simply blocked the referrer domain of statsaholic. Your domain will continue to work until you become big and they block you too.
See their website for a Firefox workaround by turning off referrers.
“eventually Amazon just turned off all ability to hot link to their graphs from any outside site.”
Hot linking of the images is still working, see here– > http://usedmotorhome.com/alexa.asp
APIs are great and I’m always impressed by companies that make their APIs public. My problem with Amazon is that they are trying to rewrite history and squash a good company that was simply using an open API. If you want total control (which seems impossible in the days of Web 2.0), don’t publish the API.
It took Alexa a long time, but why did Ron not take the offer? Any info about that?
I think they had the right to do whatever they want. It is their service, Alexaholic was only piggybacking their service, compared to slide.com and myspace etc. They can do anything they can to protect their company and investment. If Alexaholic was smart, they would have not piggybacked the service and started their own stats from the beginning. They had the choice. If alexaholic is smart, they would collect the data themselves.
Very bad of Alexa. Frankly this is disgusting stuff. Live and let live Alexa.. Stop this nonsense and compete fairly..
Can someone clue me in on how Statsaholic works? Is it using a published Alexa API or does it scrape the data?
ARRRRRINGTON POST SOMETHING ELSE THIS IS BORING!!!
Mike,
As bad as this whole situation is the fact that Alexa thinks it’s a good idea to choose their blog as a platform to threaten Statsaholic with a lawsuit. I blogged about this here:
http://thomashawk.com/2007/03/.....ng-to.html
From Alexa’s blog:
“Alexa doesn’t take the decision to bring legal action lightly but will do so when required. We’ll pursue this issue aggressively and intend to recover the Alexaholic URL and to ensure that Mr. Hornbaker is held accountable for misappropriating our graphs and data.”
Why does a $16 billion company think the best way to crush a small time guy who built a really cool service is by threatening legal action on their blog?
The interesting thing about all of this is Amazon/Alexa basically get their data from people that are suckered into installing the Alexa toolbar on their IE. It’s a massive exercise in user generated content that they pay these users how much for?
If they were smart they’d rethink this. It’s only going to raise more awareness for statsaholic (which is already back up now by the way with a 10 second Firefox hack http://ronhornbaker.com/10-sec.....here-else/), and try to play nice.
The future is about building the best platform and not being proprietary with your user data. Does Flickr complain when someone creates a really cool mashup that pulls thumbnails of Flickr called Flickrleech? Do they sue somebody for using a variation of the Flickr name? No.
And when Chris Nixon creates Zooomr Hits and showcases the best of Zooomr, do we blog that we are going to sue him for using the Zooomr name? Of course not.
Part of Web 2.0 is about sharing. It’s about creating interesting things and allowing a certain degree of flexibility for people who want to create cool new mashups and interesting ways to use the data.
Amazon should have a better understanding of this than they do in my opinion.
If Statsaholic was/is using public alexa API, and got shutdown — that just seems wrong.
It is a warning sign for anyone that uses any of Amazon’s APIs: E-Commerce Service, S3, EC2, Mechanical Turk…
“you can play, you could get big, and we can shut you down.”
They are not JUST using publicly documented/available APIs, they are also reverse engineering undocumented API behaviour and scraping.
On the relying on undocumented behaviour part, any SW person knows that relying on this is at your own risk, the capability can change/go-away/get-locked-down anytime.
oh yeah, the MajorNetworkNews thing I reference is getting info from RSS feeds, documented APIs, but you know what, the feed can go away, change behaviour any time, and it’s at the feed source’s pleasure.
It is definitely within Amazon’s rights to deny access to their data, especially if the user is scraping rather than using some documented API, where there may be an implicit consent by Amazon (though they probably limit that in the user agreement).
The lesson is clear: you can’t really build a business from just a feature that’s based on data that somebody else controls. It might work while you’re too small to care about, but if your business actually succeeds, then your data source might realize you’re on to something, and simply come over and eat your lunch.
Initially I was on the side of Statsaholic on this, but now I think that really, both of them have made mistakes regarding this issue.
First of all, I disagree with Alexa’s decision to take the Alexaholic domain and name. They should embrace those who support them - Alexaholic was bring more attention and love to Alexa than could possibly be “harmed” by using their domain. They could have simply given Alexaholic a revokable license to use the name and therefore avoided any chance of “dilution”.
But on Alexaholic’s side, it seems that the owner claimed no API was available for the data, but there clearly is. I looked at Alexa’s API (linked from their blog), and it looks like they charge 15 cents per 1,000 requests. That’s a 0.15 CPM, and that’s not to mention that Alexaholic can cache redundant requests, pushing down the CPM even more. Now, I’m absolutely sure that Alexaholic can make enough from advertising to easily cover the 0.15 CPM cost to use the API, so I don’t think they have much of a case there.
In short, Alexaholic should be using the Alexa API, and Alexa shouldn’t be harassing Alexaholic for any other reason than the lack of API usage.
Lets get a toolbar together and build out stataholic into its own entity… take on the big boys directly…
Rob
@SD - there is no API for the Alexa graphs. Alexa does provide an API for their data points (15 cents/thousand requests), and their website thumbnail images (20 cents/thousand requests). I currently pay them around $350/mo for the data that makes it way to pages like http://www.statsaholic.com/sethgodin.
I have offered to pay for the graph images, even though they’ve let webmasters and bloggers hotlink them for free for 5 years (and they let Alexaholic hotlink them for free for a year, with their tacit approval), and help them develop an official API for the graphs. I’m currently waiting on a response to that proposal.
I’m not a fan of hotlinking in general, and hope they start to offer an official api so people can pay for the graphs. But consider how allowing hotlinking helps a business like (guess who) Amazon grow - think of the hundreds of millions of hotlinked book cover images served by the millions of Amazon affiliates of the world. Think Amazon is worried about the bandwidth generated by letting people show their book images on their sites? Of course not. And Alexa has the same idea in their current free Widgets, which are simply javascript wrappers around hotlinked graph images that people can put on their site. But let a site like Alexaholic add some features to make Alexa charts more useful, and now it’s a bad thing.
Michael March 30th, 2007 at 3:46 am Even though Alexaholic came up with some good and fresh ideas, its whole business is still based on the data which is owned by Alexa/Amazon. And still the owner of this data should be allowed to decide if their data is used by someone else or not.
I think you’re missing the point here: Amazon wants to be known as a “web platform” but when someone actually takes them up on the offer they turn around with threats of lawsuits, well after they make that functionality part of their core product.
Why would anyone want to take Amazon up on their empty promises of being a web platform if this is the end result? Sure they own the data, but if they do bait and switches like this then no body will want to play with them.
That is a Really dishonest move by Amazon. I fee bad for the statsaholic guys and give them 100% of my support.
Ron,
In that case, I’m behind you 100%. If Alexa claims they are a web platform, they need to back it up with full APIs (which are reasonably-priced of course).
#43 Aren’t you questioning the whole idea of Web 2.0: creating your business on data owned by someone else?
Does anyone think that Google would ever do something similar with thier Maps API if a service that was using it ever got too big?
In a related Amazon question, the graphing ability of book ranking started off with Kaplan’s Amazonscan.com, and they made him change it — it became Junglescan.com but that’s been offline for over a year now. I know several book obsessed authors who would more than love an online representation of the Amazon ranking for their latest book — even though they all know Amazon’s sales are actually quite small and not necessarily representative of actual sales.
Is there anyone doing this?
AlexaRadar.com is another victim of Amazon/Alexa (I was paying for API as well). Just renamed it to HITgeist.com
http://www.popvoucher.co.uk