Its just that the competition gets too strong. Alexa below 50,000 is too easy to manipulate. The closer you start getting to 1, the more realistic it becomes. Sites like Yahoo, MSN and Google have not achieved Alexa ranks of 1 , 2 and 3 respectively without real traffic. Remember, these sites up there receive millions of users every day from all over the world. So the closer you go to 1, the realistic it becomes, and hence the more difficult to manipulate it. You have to have real traffic and lots of it to make the Alexa creep up further (become closer to 1).
50000.. then it becomes a bit harder.. indeed.. you can manipulate alexa easy. I think it's a shame some companies use it to make prices like text link ads. i think alexa is great in offering website info.. but their rankingsystem s#cks..
I agree alexa rankings is a good thing for example i set myself target such as get into top 75k so i have something fun to work towards when marketing my site.
Doesn't mean adbrite is correct in doing that. Fact is, alexa IS and HAS been totally meaningless for a good while now. It's still fun to check your ranking, I check mine like once every 2 or 3 months, but certainly dont use it as a standard. P.S. except real low numbers, then it gets a little more useful. Like below 1000...
Regardless of how useful alexa is, fact remains that places like adbrite and Text Links use them. Pages with better rankings would look more attractive to advertise on as a result for advertisers.
yea for some blogspots it reads blogspot alexa rating and some get so much traffic they get on their own alexa rating