Nigeria breasts the tape

Almost...almost...

Humble web forum Nairaland.com will be the first Naija website to crack the top 1000 by Alexa's ranking of 3-month average traffic.
More local sites will follow, as cheaper internet access (smarter phones for less, ISPs lowering rates) helps pump up the user base for all. By the way, around May 2011, when I worked at 234next.com, we cracked the 5,000 ranking and "top 1000" quickly became the (quite achievable) mission, but the parent NEXT had to go and die that summer.  Bummer.

Other African sites in the top 1000:
Gumtree (South African marketplace à la craigslist), and a trio of Arabic-language Egyptian sites (youm7 - news service, fatakat- shopping, and  myegy - entertainment). 

Can My__ Make It? Part Two. But it's once again called myspace.

Make a top 10 comeback? Probably not.  But its decline has slowed in the last two years. 

Source: UpNaira July 2011 - can my__ make it?

From around #12 most popular site in the world in 2009 down down down...

Now outside the top 200, still losing ground but more slowly now.

The "new myspace" announced around September 2012, then launched in January, seems to have helped.   Here are some reviews: 
Techcrunch: Myspace squandered the only thing it had left - it deleted the f*ing fans.  Ouch. 
TopTenReviews: Myspace has been at the top of the heap of social network sites, and then on the bottom.  It is now capitalizing on its music-lover niche.

 My review

Good: I like the music and playlists and finding little-known artistes.  I like a comeback.
Bad: The login process is confusing.  Even owner-investor Justin Timberlake's latest videos are not on his profile. 

Is twitter gaining on facebook?

In spite of the headlines, and the feeling I get that "everybody" is on twitter - highschoolers, college kids, brands and wannabe-brands, this is what a major web-traffic data site has to say about that question:

Facebook remains heavily dominant over twitter

Facebook, with its #2 ranking and 45% reach, maintains a 5-1 lead over twitter (about 9% average reach for Q1 2013 and ranked 10th most popular site in the world).  It's what the data says.  Now one could question the sample e.g. who uses the alexa tool? 

Converting between Alexa rank and number of site visitors

I think there is a weirdly linear (in a log-log sense) relationship between the visitor count (number of monthly visitors) and the global Alexa rank of a website.
This is called a power law.
It is easy enough to remember - a little like Moore's law, or Ohm's law :)

Relationship between Alexa rank and monthly visitors

It implies that to improve your ranking by a factor of 10, you need 10 times the visitors.
To halve your ranking, double the visitor count.  
If you dropped to 1/3 of your usual site visitors, your new ranking will be old ranking x three.
And so on.

Here's the data I used:

Site	%Traffic Reach	Est. Monthly Visitors*	Alexa rank
yahoo	20	1000000000	4
craigslist	1.5	75000000	42
meetup	0.2	10000000	465
nairaland	0.08	4000000	1385
jobberman	0.02	1000000	4653
cp-africa	0.004	200000	44206
wemabank	0.00028	14000	557445

*The monthly visitors numbers are estimated by assuming jobberman has 1million visitors per month (I think that corresponds to a ranking around 5k) and that the traffic reach percentage (data given by alexa for each site) is simply number of visitors for this site / a fixed number corresponding to all traffic.  That is, take the traffic to be proportional to the traffic reach percentage.