Recently I was on Alexaholic (cough cough, I mean Statsaholic) and found my graphs were not being displayed. I thought it was odd at the time but then, it could have been a glitch, my service provider, etc, so I just left my curiosity of another day. Today being that day I went back to Statsaholic and found that this problem wasn’t a glitch but was an attempt by Alexa to put Statsaholic out of business (what else could it mean, right?).
Anyway on the front page he has this post which isn’t really a summary so much as a copy/paste (some how I don’t think he will mind) of what the hell is going on between Alexa and Statsaholic.
David vs. Goliath
On March 18, in response to legal action taken against me by Alexa over the use of their name in my domain alexaholic.com, I changed the name of this website to Statsaholic. Now, on March 23, Amazon/Alexa is still trying to shut this website down, this time by blocking their traffic graphs if you’re viewing them from this site.
While blocking the hotlinking of their images is certainly within their right, in this case they are selectively blocking just this website, because tens of thousands of other websites, and Alexa’s own free widgets, hotlink their traffic graphs in exactly the same manner as I’m doing. Just so Alexa knows, I would gladly pay a reasonable fee to serve their graph images here, but to date they have no official api for those images.
I’m doing my best to keep the site up with some creative coding, but it’s not looking good for the little guy here. If you see a white box where the graph should be, that’s Alexa blocking us again. It appears that the decision makers at Amazon think mashups and creative use of their api is fine, unless you get successful with it.
TechCrunch, Matt Mullenweg (founder of WordPress), WebForth, and Michelle MacPhearson have covered the story so far. If you blog about it, contact me and I’ll link to you here. If you’re a member of the press, call me for an interview.
Perhaps it would help if you contact Alexa and let them know what you think. Either way, thank you for your ongoing support and use of Statsaholic. Traffic here has been holding strong, so I must be doing something right.
-Ron
I have a single suggestion that instantly floated to my mind as a course of action on how to not only push Amazon (they own Alexa) back from this aggressive behaviour but deter others and that is MoAB (Month of Apple Bugs), that project I believe was partially stimulated by the way Apple acted towards two security researchers late last year.
Why can’t we do the same? It could be bugs, it could be service critisism, it could be design/UI flaws, etc. The world is your oyster and I think we should hammer Amazon all through April 2007. If you are keen on this spread the word. I suggest we tag it in Technorati as MoAm (There are only 10 posts in all of Technorati using this tag so it would be a simple way of tracking the numbers of publishers).
What do you think?
Tags: moam, amazon, alexa
