nice post…

Is there anyone doing this?

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, …

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).

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.

When I first started to become more heavily intersted and involved in the Internet and Internet technologies, Alexa was one of the sites that I latched on to. The site provided a reasonable, free way of gauging the success of a site, and I definitely d…

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.

Rob

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.

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.

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.”