By FN for APCNews GOA, India,
Published onPage last updated on
APC.org – the bilingual English-Spanish site of the Association for Progressive Communications – currently ranks 15,260 in terms of traffic among sites globally rated by the alexa.com information service belonging to amazon.com
This means, the apc.org is ranked among the top 15,500 sites globally. "This is simply extraordinary for a .org site. In our field I think the only one doing better is EFF.org (the Electronics Frontier Foundation, a network aimed at "defending freedom in the digital world"), ranked at 8,500," commented Daniel Pimienta of Funredes.org, an organisation that recently became an APC member.
Incidentally, the APC is ranked higher than a number of "heavy weight" sites such as ITU.int, UNDP.org, IDRC.ca and DevelopmentGateway.org.
Funredes.org is itself ranked around 237,000, says Pimienta, which is a "very good figure for a non-governmental organisation in that field [above many US-based non-profits with much more financial support and marketing capacity]".
Some like Pimienta argue that APC.org’s score indicates that the impact of the website goes way beyond "civil society ‘professionals’ and that the multilingual (approach of the site) will boost the impact and enhance the figure".
Some prefer to nuance these statistics, saying that alexa.com is essentially a commercial venture meant to influence advertisement trends. They argue that many websites – especially those of small organisations and nonprofits – therefore go unnoticed in the tracking system.
Others again would rather like to look at the qualitative measures. "Who comes to visit our website? What information are they after? Are most hits generated by webcrawlers or real people?" asks Frédéric Dubois, APC’s information coordinator.
His colleague Adolfo Dunayevich, technical coordinator, goes back to the figures and explains that "they (alexa.com) have some toolbar, a kind of spyware, and they monitor traffic with their toolbar users." He discovered this in testing the ranking system, entering the subdomain laneta.apc.org, from APC’s member in Mexico. He says the same figure came up as for the APC.org domain. "Not good, not bad, just context," he concludes.
Despite these considerations, Frédéric believes APC’s content lives up to expectations. “The mix of daily news production, frequently-updated training materials, papers on internet policy and our many technology projects digging out the questions of gender and the environment, probably help to boost the website to its actual level of popularity,” he says.
A link on alexa.com to that wonderful tool called the ‘WayBack machine’ that archives earlier versions of websites, also takes you to a 1996 version [1] of the APC.org site.
Alexa says that just under 1,000 sites, in all, link to apc.org [2], which range from giant search engine Google, to sitepoint.com, the free software foundry Sourceforge.net, Yahoo, answers.com and others.
Besides English and Spanish, APC.org is currently being redesigned into a four language website, bringing a full-fledged French and a limited Portuguese version in the fold -languages widely used in Africa and the Americas.
See http://alexa.com/data/details/main?q=apc.org&url=apc.org for the latest APC.org standing and details.
1 http://web.archive.org/web/19961219043901/http://www.apc.org/
2 http://www.alexa.com/data/ds/linksin?q=link:apc.org/&url=apc.org
