Alexa, who is number one for Australian manufacturing news? (It’s us.)

For a long time, Amazon’s Alexa (no, not the virtual assistant of the same name) has been the go-to tool for measuring website traffic and analytics.

Alexa Internet was founded in 1996, and bought three years after that by what is now an e-commerce and cloud computing behemoth. Alexa harvests information from browser extensions downloaded by web users as well as from websites that use Alexa script, and extrapolates it into an overall picture of engagement for a given website. It’s not perfect, but it’s pretty good.

Curious about how we were faring against the handful of competing sites focussed on Australian manufacturing news, we went to Alexa last week. We’re chuffed to report that we’re number one.

We are miles and miles ahead of every website but one. We won’t name them, but according to Alexa, 53 per cent of their traffic for the last month was from India. When we last checked in December, roughly half of their visitors were from the Philippines.

These seem impossible results, until you consider the possible explanation of click farms. Articles on the subject often cite developing nations like the ones above as leaders in the fake online engagement industry. Such farms pay workers low wages to like, click, subscribe, review etcetera, making influencers, products, websites etcetera appear more popular than they are.

A quick look at the free version of another online tool, Semrush, similarly shows us leading this worthwhile niche – covering what’s going on in manufacturing here – if you don’t count the unnamed website. According to Semrush, [redacted] has ten times the number of pages clicked on per visitor (!) compared to any other site within the niche, and an average visit time of over 53 minutes (!)

We are thrilled to be able to tell advertisers that we are by far the most popular site dedicated to Australian manufacturing, and the extent of our artificial reach-boosting techniques has been liking our own Linkedin updates and paying for a couple of promoted posts on Facebook.

If you invest your marketing dollars with @AuManufacturing, know that you’ll be in front of an audience who work in and care about manufacturing here, rather than people in another country behind a bank of smartphones, juicing the impression and click numbers.

We’re proud to have built a website, newsletter and community of superior size and reach (figures can be seen in our media kit here) and to have done so through old-style journalistic values, including honesty with our audience, timeliness, discrimination around what is and isn’t news, and a passion for what we’re covering. We’ll leave the advertorial dressed up as reporting, and the labour exploitation, to other publishers.

While Alexa Internet is finishing up in May, we’re going to be around for a good long while. For now you can compare website traffic, statistics and analytics at this link.

Thank you for your interest,

Brent Balinski and Peter Roberts, founders, @AuManufacturing

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