Hasta La Gadget!

Oct 23

Amazon (Alexa) vs. Statsaholic

This article was written on April 20, 2007 by CyberNet.

You’ve probably heard of Statsaholic by now. It was formerly named Alexaholic, and the service allowed you to enter up to five different domains and compare their Alexa traffic statistics. They called it traffic comparisons on steroids, and it did everything that Alexa probably should have done from the start. It was a better product.

When Statsaholic first emerged, it turned out to be better than Alexa itself. But the irony was, Alexa (Amazon) didn’t put up a fuss over this. Instead, they turned and complimented them for such a great service. This friendly side didn’t last though, because once more people learned of Alexaholic and they started using it instead of Alexa, the situation turned ugly.

Alexa decided they wanted ownership of the Alexaholic domain because of trademark issues. No problem. The owner of the site, Ron Horbaker went on to change the name to Statsaholic, and he said this change suited the site well for the upcoming changes he had in store.

After this change occurred without a glitch, Amazon decided they weren’t done yet. Recently they filed a lawsuit against Ron Horbaker, and according to ZDNet, they’re “suing him into oblivion.”

Now when you go to Statsaholic and enter in domain names to compare, it only returns a graph for one of the sites which makes the service pretty useless. Amazon is doing everything they can to keep Statsaholic from taking any of their users away, and on top of it, Alexa has essentially stolen their ideas.

Mashable has the 43 page filing, and the blogosphere is calling for a boycott of Amazon. While we really haven’t heard Amazon’s side of the story, it sounds to me like they’re bullying. It also sounds like it’s something that could have been settled without this big hoopla. It’s the big guy versus the little guy, and a lose-lose situation.

Alexa Changes Ranking System

GMail’s Alexa Page “Hacked”?

Amazon Working on a PayPal Competitor?

Alexa Revamps Traffic Details With Much Needed Features