The African Social Networks : How they Measure
Thanks to Alexa Traffic Monitoring we have a little benchmark on this sites to help us see how they compare againts each other. Before I dive into these sites one by one and discuss their strong points and shortcomings
Which I will have to wait for my next post, Lets take a deep look at what we see in the alexa graphs.
What I can infer from these graphs are as follows
- None of these sites are major presently, as it seems they have yet to make an impact on the web top 100,000 site list. They sometimes make brief appearances, with the exception of Caramellounge.com
- Caramellounge.com leads the pack by far with Afriqueka.com following but quite far behind. The other 2 its kinda hard to tell as they don't have that much stats
- From the thumbnails, Afrinity I would say looks best but on further inspection that is easily disputed
- As am looking at social network scripts it and Phpfox happens to be a popular one. I notice that MyAfricaSite.com has not been redesigned or modified and its just a plain simple installation of the script
4 comments:
Interesting analysis; however, all the web metrics available are biased against the sites you've analyzed, in fact any african-themed site for that matter. To get a more accurate result one would need to adjust for at least Internet usage and penetration...which is in single digit percentage in Africa. One other determinant to consider is the availability of high speed Internet.
Nice idea to rank everything. I agree with comment above. Alexa, as I understand it, takes submissions from people with the Alexa toolbar installed. For that and other reasons, it's going to be horribly biased against Africa.
I wonder about tools like http://www.muti.co.za/ ? Traffic looks small but an African Reddit is something we all need.
If you want to go completely corporate in terms of South African sites (not necessarily web 2.0 stuff) - have a look at that crappy you-scratch-my-back-I'll-comb-yours organisation called the OPA... think the link is http://www.opa.org.za/
Thanks guys, thats very true, couldnt find any other metric to use, and also I am aware that if the webmasters use the alexa toolbar they can influence their alexa rankings. I'll have to start looking at other things such as Indexed pages and maybe someway of determining member numbers
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