WorldNetDaily has uncovered a new conspiracy: Amazon-operated Alexa is mysteriously lowering traffic rankings of right-wing websites!
Leo Hohmann writes in an Oct. 13 WND article:
Those who run watchdog news websites are scratching their heads and trying to make sense of the latest data released by a California company that measures website traffic.
According to data for July through September, almost every major website – from WND to the Drudge Report and Breitbart – saw its rankings drop on Alexa.com while pro-government sites mostly went up.Alexa Internet Inc. is a subsidiary of Amazon.
Familiar names in alternative media like the Drudge Report, Breitbart, Infowars, the Blaze, Newsmax, WND, FoxNews.com, and the Daily Caller all saw their rankings plummet while sites such as NPR.org, the Daily Kos, Democracy Now!, Media Matters and ThinkProgress all rose in the rankings.
Notice how Hohmann defined right-wing website as “watchdog” sites while liberal sites became “pro-government.” And Hohmann waited until the 22nd paragraph of his article to note the likely explanation behind it: an Alexa blog post describing the site’s newly expanded data sampling to provide more accurate metrics.
Nevertheless, Hohmann pushes the conspiracy angle in a WND article the following day:
Statistically, it would seem to be impossible.
How could every major alternative website that challenges the mainstream, establishment view of Washington and the world be experiencing a drop-off in readership while their counterparts on the other side of the political spectrum are gaining readers?
It appears unlikely, yet that’s exactly what happened last month, according to Alexa.com, which measures web traffic and ranks websites from the most popular to the least popular.
The Drudge Report, WND, Breitbart, Fox News, the Blaze, Newsmax, CNSNEWS, the Daily Caller, Infowars and Natural News are all plunging in popularity, according to Alexa’s rankings.
At the same time, pro-government sites like the Daily Kos, ThinkProgress, Media Matters, MSNBC, NPR.org and Democracy Now! are all rising in popularity, according to Alexa.
Alexa rankings are important because they are among a handful of measurement tools used by companies when deciding where to spend their advertising dollars.
Nowhere in his two articles does Hohmann raise the possibility that Alexa’s previous data was flawed and that the new numbers more accurately reflect traffic.
This refusal to see the truth and assume a conspiracy is just another reason why nobody believes WND — and why its traffic is dropping.