A year has zipped by since we last looked at the Alexa rankings for various sites in New Zealand. The last report was when The BFD was a reasonably new site, so how are things going, one year later?
A quick recap for the new readers: Google.com has an Alexa ranking of 1 meaning it is the most popular web address on the planet. So low Alexa ranking numbers are good, high numbers are not good.
In contrast, google.co.nz has an Alexa ranking of 3,874 in the world and 6 in New Zealand.
Each site in the table has two measures of its popularity: the NZ Rank and the World Rank. As one would expect, these reflect traffic to the site from New Zealand visitors and from the whole of the world (including New Zealand), respectively.
The Sites Linking rank is a count of how many other websites link to the site being measured. Here, a high number is good.
The Bounce rate is a measure of engagement with a site. Alexa define this as “Percentage of visits to the site that consist of a single pageview.” So here, low is good and high means that the visitor to the site did not stay and look around.
Certified. ‘Yes’ indicates that the site has an official Alexa counter that guarantees the result. A ‘No’ means the numbers are an estimate. Given Alexa’s status in this area, they will be reasonably reliable estimates.
The shading in the table indicates a better or worse measure than this time last year. Interestingly, just about every measure for everyone is in the red.
So how is The BFD looking compared to other blogs that have been in existence for many years?
It is great to note that The BFD has maintained its preeminent position on all measures. Two and a half times as good in New Zealand as The Spinoff with its 10,000 subscribers! Still up there with the number of sites linking and easily maintaining the lowest bounce rate. It is good to see that the ‘right’ leaning blogs have better engagement than the ‘left’ leaners.
Take a bow, The BFD!
An interesting change for the better is thedailyblog.co.nz. Last year they did not have a ranking in New Zealand because not enough Kiwis visit this site to make an impression with the counter. However, their most popular visitor country is India (52%), followed by Pakistan (26%) with New Zealand a lowly third, only 11% of readers. Surely they are not buying clicks to improve their ranking?
Thestandard.org.nz has completely dropped off the New Zealand ranking table.
Last time we compared the numbers to a major MSM site. So let’s add Radio NZ to the table again.
Considering how long Radio NZ has had to build website traffic and with daily national radio coverage to drive visitors to their site, The BFD is doing pretty well in comparison. Three times as many sites link in to The BFD and the bounce rate is way better.
Just for fun, last year, we ran a comparison with the Podium of Truth websites and as we are continually exhorted to check these sites for the latest details on the pandemic, it was only right to include them again.
After a year of blitzing us multiple times per day via TV, print, radio etc the Alexa rankings for those sites, health.govt.nz and covid19.govt.nz, must be really low as our health is critically important. Let’s add the last two rows to the table.
Oops! They have dropped badly as well.
Clearly The BFD remains more important to Kiwi web users than COVID-19.
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