It has recently come to my attention that the almost-worthless website ranking site Alexa has begun selling shirts of most of the sites that they track statistics of.
The shirts are pretty ugly and pointless. As proud as I am of my ranking on their site, I don’t think that I or anyone else is going to ever want a shirt that proudly proclaims my Alexa rank (as of this writing) of 3,560,408 (no kidding, look it up!).
But, really, Alexa ratings are pretty worthless. Alexa tracks the viewing habits of users who are using their toolbar in their browser. The Alexa toolbar only works for people using Internet Explorer in Windows operating systems. While this gets a respectable amount of statistics, it ignores a healthy chunk of the Internet browsing populace.
My Alexa rating, then, is an OK metric, but ultimately of limited use. I usually don’t even bother checking it.
Now I see that they are using the data that they’ve collected about my site to sell tee shirts. Low quality tee shirts look like something that the marketing department threw together in about ten minutes. I’m assuming that the tee shirts are for the people that own the sites, because I’m not sure who else would be the target for a shirt that proclaims, “Will dance for better Alexa rank 3,560,408″. I don’t think that it’s worth $20 for me to put that on a shirt that I would actually wear anywhere.
If anyone has $20 burning a hole in their pocket and they just have to have come crummysocks.com branded-wear, send me a message and we can work something out.