Alexa gives stats on billions of Web pages

Why? Well, among other things, Alexa gives him user traffic rankings for each Web site link it offers, so he can tell the immensely popular online shoe store from a newly opened e-commerce site with no history -- and perhaps, no legitimacy.

That's exactly the kind of information Kaplan likes to offer to his own customers at AdBrite, an e-commerce site that connects advertisers and Web sites.Kaplan founded the San Francisco company and runs as chief executive.

He chose Alexa Web Information Service -- officially launched by Amazon.com subsidiary Alexa Internet on Tuesday -- when he wanted to tailor his site's offerings to customers using Web market research such as historical and current data on other sites.

Alexa Web Information Service consists of more than 100 terabytes of data that Alexa has collected on some 4.5 billion Web pages at 16 million sites. For software and Web developers, Alexa's database of traffic rankings, load speeds, related links and site contact information offers the potential to create new kinds of applications.

Developers can use Alexa's WebMap to invent new search engine algorithms and build a Web directory on their site, among other things.

At AdBrite, Kaplan said that Alexa helped him "show advertisers all sorts of stats on traffic, unique user counts, (and) the country of origin of the users."

"And internally, we have a site sales team who calls major Web sites, and says, 'Hey, you should use AdBrite,' and that team uses Alexa rankings -- and they generate hundreds of thousands of dollars of revenue for us."

Kaplan said it was easy to use the data that Alexa Web Information offers. And every month, for the first 10,000 information requests per user, it's free. After that, they charge 15 cents per 1,000 requests.

Not exactly a cash cow, though some users could generates millions of requests per month. But it could have some interesting applications, say analysts who follow the company.

"Is there a large revenue opportunity immediately here? Probably not," said Jeetil Patel, a Deutsche Bank analyst who follows Amazon.com. "It is a way for them to get the word out there about what Alexa has been up to, since Alexa has been such a dormant piece of the business for such a long time" in terms of revenue.

Alexa has been available in beta test form for about a year, which is how Kaplan was able to get the jump on it.

Its creators say they don't really know what could come out of having thousands of Web developers tinker with the database.

"That's part of the beauty of this ... We don't exactly know who is going to use it and exactly what they will use it for," said Adam Selipsky, the vice president of product management and developer relations for Amazon Web Services. "We are just going to let different parts of the developer community have at it."

Patel says that it's is too early to tell what will happen, but Amazon could find ways to make more money from the service. The Amazon team emphasized relationship building, though Selipsky said they do not vet the requests that come in for the information, nor do they track how it is used.

"The more technology we can expose and make useful for external developers, the better the relationship with them over time," said Selipsky, who called the program very scalable.

"Historically, the Alexa service has just existed in our toolbar and Web site, and the main consumer of the data has been the Web surfer," said Geoffrey Mack, Alexa product manager.

"For a long time, we've had people asking for access to our data ... 'Can we get a copy of your entire database, or how about an XML feed of your data?' "

When enough requests accumulated that Alexa's team "figured we really had something," Mack said, "we built one."

Kaplan chose Alexa rather than Google's competing, if not entirely comparable, offering of page rankings because he said Alexa offers more complexity.

"Sites that you and I may never have heard of but are ranked 1,000 on Alexa have generated lots of sales for us," Kaplan said.

"It's just the right fit."

With 140,000 developers already registered with Amazon Web Services, it should be interesting to see what happens.

P-I reporter Kristen Millares Bolt can be reached at 206-448-8142 or kristenbolt@seattlepi.com.

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