10 Magazine poll: And the winners are... with Alexa ranking goodness

With hat tips and congratulations, the 10 Magazine poll asking readers' favorite Korean blogs is over. With that goes an odd sort of voting - only one blog could be chosen as 'the best', and three blogs taking a majority of the vote. Considering there's 'over 300 English blogs on Korea' according to 10 Magazine (I read almost 100 of them myself), that's a bit surprising. There's nothing really at stake, and frankly I have no need to satiate my ego by a poll.

Since I was a bit curious about the numbers, though, I decided to download the Alexa Toolbar and see what their rankings were for each of the blogs mentioned. In case the name is unfamiliar, Alexa "computes traffic rankings by analyzing the Web usage of millions of Alexa Toolbar users and data obtained from other, diverse traffic data sources. The information is sorted, sifted, anonymized, counted, and computed, until, finally, we get the traffic rankings shown in the Alexa service." For more information about their methodologies, go here. Since few websites / blogs publicly disclose the number of hits they get, this seemed like the most neutral (e.g. least biased) way to satisfy my personal curiosity. There are a few hiccups within the data, but exclude the outliers and there's actually some interesting things to look at.

The aforementioned poll was kind enough to put the URL in parentheses, which I copied and pasted into the address bar. Once the website / blog loaded, I noted the Alexa ranking as indicated on the installed toolbar, as of this post (18 March 2010). For your viewing pleasure (remember lower rankings = higher traffic numbers; note these numbers likely change frequently)...

The Marmot's Hole (rjkoehler.com) 5% - #69,277

Chris in South Korea (chrisinsouthkorea.blogspot.com) 2% - #261,743

The Grand Narrative (thegrandnarrative.wordpress.com) 2% - no rank [huh?!]

Zen Kimchi (zenkimchi.com) 3% - #227,270

Brian in Jeollanam-do (briandeutsch.blogspot.com) 6% - #80,522

Gusts of Popular Feeling (populargusts.blogspot.com) 3% - #320,744

Eat Your Kimchi (eatyourkimchi.com) 5% - #342,059

Korean Modern Literature in Translation (ktlit.com) 14% - #4,798,177

Seoul Eats (seouleats.com) 3% - #188,225

Korean Rum Diary (koreanrumdiary.blogspot.com - Rated PG-13 for profanity.) 5% - #398,176

Ask The Expat (asktheexpat.blogspot.com) 1% - #221,051

An Idiot's Tale (yankeenom.blogspot.com -Rated PG-13 for profanity.) 18% - #248,655

Korea Beat (us.asiancorrespondent.com/korea-beat) 2% - #35,628 [based on the asiancorrespondent.com domain name, so it's not just KB's blog making the rank higher]

Six in Seoul (sixinseoul.weebly.com) 24% - #799 [rank for weebly.com, not the Six in Seoul blog specifically]

Ruby Clicks (rubyclicks.blogspot.com) 1% - no rank

ESL Teacher Time (eslteachertime.blogspot.com - Rated PG-13 for profanity.) 1% - #14,269,016

You Can't Hold Me Responsible for This (joseph-gutierrez.com - Rated PG-13 for profanity) 2% - #12,334,085

Rip City To Seoul (ripcitytoseoul.wordpress.com) 3% - #2,901,299

Incidentally, at least one fellow blogger noted a lack of an invitation, so I checked them out in the same fashion (again, lower rankings = higher traffic numbers):

Extra Korea! (http://extrakorea.wordpress.com/) - #1,101,135

An acorn in the dog's food (http://samedi.livejournal.com/) - #82 [ranking for livejournal.com, not for the individual blog]

Ask a Korean! (http://askakorean.blogspot.com/) - #300,518

Dokdo is Ours! (http://dokdoisours.blogspot.com/) - #267,122

@koreangov (http://governmentofkorea.blogspot.com/) - #995,474

A few more I read for good measure:

Foreigner/Joy (http://foreignerjoy.blogspot.com/) - #732,854

Roboseyo (http://roboseyo.blogspot.com/) - #556,919

ROK Drop (http://rokdrop.com) - #115,209

A Geek in Korea (http://blog.torgodevil.com/) - #2,226,974

Doing it Korean Style (http://hookingupinhanguk.tumblr.com/) - #163 [tumblr.com, not specifically her blog]

Paul Ajosshi (http://ajosshi.blogspot.com/) - #3,007,298

The Chosun Bimbo (http://stafford.squarespace.com/) - #2,481 [squarespace.com, not specifically his blog].

Hermit Hideaways (http://hermithideaways.com/) - #2,491,852 [doesn't include how many readers he may have on cnngo.com, however...]

For reference / control purposes, these are a few other Korea-related websites Alexa-ranked on the same date:

Korea Times (http://koreatimes.co.kr) - #9,330

Korea Herald (http://koreaherald.co.kr) - #19,515

Hankyoreh (http://english.hani.co.kr) - #6,204 [probably includes readers reading all languages - just a guess]

Yonhap (http://english.yonhapnews.co.kr) - #15,598

Groove Magazine (http://groovekorea.com) - #3,025,933

10 Magazine (http://10magazine.asia) - #278,031

Seoulstyle (http://seoulstyle.com) - #302,818

Korean News Feeds (http://koreannewsfeeds.com) - #516,844

ESL Cafe (http://eslcafe.com) - #9,248

Korea4Expats (http://korea4expats.com) - #123,548

Chatjip (http://chatjip.com) - #928,571

Hub of Sparkle (http://www.koreasparkle.com/) - #1,351,573

So what are we to make of all these rankings, outside of a rough correlation between percentages received and popularity for the valid data points? Getting your readers to a given site to vote for a given blog is much more a popularity contest than an indication of which one is 'best'. Having an emotional connection with them - and actively promoting the voting ritual - is certainly helpful as well. If you're writing good stuff and people are reading it, that helps things along as well.

So what do you think? If you have another idea for analysis - or if you want to throw your Alexa ranking out there - comments are open. Play nice.

Creative Commons License © Chris Backe - 2010

This post was originally published on my blog, Chris in South Korea. If you are reading this on another website and there is no linkback or credit given, you are reading an UNAUTHORIZED FEED.