Inquirer.net reclaims top news site ranking

By: John Nery - 10 years ago

alexa.com

MANILA, Philippines–A certified hit. After completing a three-week certification process, Inquirer.net, the country’s pioneer in online news and information, is again the country’s leading news website as measured by its Alexa ranking.

The online operation of the Philippine Daily Inquirer zoomed up the Alexa.com list of top Philippine sites to No. 10.

Ahead of Inquirer.net are the Internet’s dominant global players, including Facebook (No. 1), Google (No. 3, but with google.com.ph coming in No. 2), Youtube (No. 4) and Yahoo (No. 5).

The other news and information websites included in the Top 25 list are ABS-CBN’s online news operation (No. 18), “social news network” Rappler (No. 19) and iGMA (No. 24), the “official portal” of the GMA television network.

Alexa is a popular source of Internet traffic statistics, because it is easy to access and to use.

Most of the traffic statistics Alexa generates are sample data; that is, estimates, which according to its website literature “are based on data from [its] global traffic panel, which is a sample of millions of Internet users using one of over 25,000 different browser extensions.”

This explains why some of the available data seem less than accurate.

However, Alexa also monitors “traffic data from direct sources in the form of sites that have chosen to install the Alexa script on their site and certify their metrics.”

Certification allows Alexa access to a website’s entire traffic, not only a sample of it.

The latest ranking of Inquirer.net is the result of certified, and thus more accurate, metrics.

Abel Ulanday, publisher of Inquirer.net, welcomed the news.

Other metrics, too

“Certification reflects our real strength, our base of readers. If you count them using unique visitors data, they number in the millions every month. We’re here because of them,” Ulanday said.

While Inquirer.net uses other sources of traffic statistics such as Google Analytics, Alexa allows the website to gather very specific data on unique visitors and page views.