Alexa ranking explained

The Alexa Traffic Rank, also simply known as the Alexa Rank, has been the world’s leading website ranking system for over 20 years.

However on 9 December 2021 Amazon.com, the parent company of Alexa, announced the retirement of the Alexa ranking system from 1 May 2022, and in preparation started excluding data from many Asian and other countries from its ranking system from sometime in the second half of 2021.

As a result, Inside Asian Gaming will be switching from Alexa to an alternative website ranking system in the near future, and this will be announced to our website visitors at that time.

The all-time high Alexa ranking for asgam.com, prior to the preparation for retirement of the Alexa ranking system, was 29,660 on 7 August 2021 and all-time high “average time on site” was 28m 57s on 7 May 2021.

Alexa ranked the most popular approximately 30 million of the world’s websites every day, in order of popularity calculated using the estimated average daily unique visitors and number of page views over the previous 90 days. This resulted in a “visitor engagement” ranking for any given website.

The lower the ranking number the better, with google.com being ranked at #1.

Any sites outside the top million websites were considered by many internet marketers to be essentially worthless, and being in the top 100,000 sites in the world was considered by many to be a major achievement.

As well as the key metric of the Alexa ranking, Alexa also issued an “average time on site” metric each day. As the name suggests, this represents the average time spent per user per day on the website. Average time on site per day for google.com (ranked #1) was around 16 minutes. For Facebook.com (usually ranked around #7) it was around 18 minutes. These are both considered exceptionally long. The average time on site for CNN, the New York Times and the Washington Post were all around three to four minutes.

Alexa rankings allowed potential advertisers and other users of websites to understand how popular and visited any given website was, especially in comparison to its competitors or peers.

IAG’s website, asgam.com, consistently ranked as the highest traffic B2B gaming media website in the world, by a long margin. Usually its nearest competitor ranked at three to five times as high, usually over the 100,000 mark.

To give a sense of how high various types of media brands ranked, here are some examples of approximate rankings:

 

Approx
ranking
Media brand Remarks
17 Xinhua News Agency The world’s top ranked media website
100 BBC The world’s oldest national broadcaster
100 CNN The world’s first 24-hour news television channel
200 The Washington Post Widest circulation newspaper in Washington, DC
300 Daily Mail The UK’s highest-circulated daily newspaper
900 Los Angeles Times Largest non-East Coast American newspaper
1,200 Time Iconic US magazine published since 1923
2,800 South China Morning Post Hong Kong’s newspaper of record, founded 1903
3,100 The Straits Times Singapore’s most famous newspaper, founded 1845
3,400 The New Yorker Iconic New York weekly magazine, founded 1925
6,300 The Age Melbourne’s newspaper of record, founded 1854
7,200 Manchester Evening News Highly website-focussed Manchester area newspaper
7,900 Toronto Star Canada’s top circulation newspaper, founded 1892
8,500 The Australian Leading Australian daily newspaper, founded 1964
17,000 Las Vegas Review-Journal Leading Nevada daily newspaper, founded 1909
20,000 Herald Sun Leading Melbourne daily newspaper, founded 1840
22,000 The Vancouver Sun Leading Vancouver daily newspaper, founded 1912
27,000 The Daily Telegraph Leading Sydney daily newspaper, founded 1927
29,000 BBC Top Gear UK motoring magazine and TV program since 1977
29,660 Inside Asian Gaming Leading Asian B2B gaming and IR media brand
34,000 The Courier Mail Brisbane’s leading daily newspaper, founded 1846
35,000 The Advertiser Adelaide’s leading daily newspaper, founded 1858
37,000 Las Vegas Sun Las Vegas daily newspaper, founded 1950
38,000 The West Australian Perth’s leading daily newspaper, founded 1833
39,000 Birmingham Mail Birmingham area newspaper, founded 1870
48,000 The Canberra Times Canberra’s leading daily newspaper, founded 1926
57,000 The Standard Free English language newspaper in Hong Kong
76,000 CEO Magazine Global media brand covering CEOs and business
128,000 Mercury Hobart’s leading daily newspaper, founded 1858
128,000 Gold Coast Bulletin Gold Coast’s leading newspaper, founded 1885
130,000 Best Lawyers Peer review legal publication, founded 1981