This is a specious argument. There are many reasons beyond how difficult it is to implement methods for why people don't want to take up your challenge. I have pointed those reasons out and you refuse to recognize them. Like I said before I have no desire to deceive any potential advertisers just to prove a point to you. For once and for all IT IS VERY I REPEAT VERY EASY TO INFLATE ALEXA STATS. I have proved this in the past for others and I have provided you with the means to implement these measures. It will take you about one half hour to pick out a list of URLs from your site to add to my script and then save it as an HTML file. In IE (which has Alexa installed) open up the page you just saved and let it run. Periodically check to make sure the browser/computer hasn't crashed. At least once a day the computer should be rebooted to resolve any memory leaks in IE. Also if the computer in question is running ZoneAlarm it needs to be shut down as the number of requests being made will cause ZoneAlarm to leak tremendous amounts of memory that crashes ZoneAlarm. You should allocate about fifteen minutes a day to maintaining the computer running the script.
I content that it is not easy. I certainly appreciate your technical input - thank you very much! I would give you another green - but it doesn't seem to want to let me.
Whether we want to define it as easy or not is irrelevant really. I think the amount of effort required is well documented and whether someone undertakes the effort depends upon their motivation. If they wanted to try it out of curiosity they might try it for a few days (which would take very minimual effort). If they wanted to scam somebody the amount of financial gain to be had will determine if the effort is worth it. I'm sure some scammers find the effort required to be worthwhile.
Looks like someone is trying their own experiment with Alexa -> http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=150995 I will be watching closely! PS - I just read the thread and they have concluded that Alexa CANNOT BE MANIPULATED! For all those here, please check out the other thread - interesting results.
It would be interesting to know if it were true or not, but I'm not going to try and find out. It would seem to be easy enough to filter out excessive clicks from a single IP to a single site. While such an obvious hole may have been finally fixed, to say that Alexa can't be manipulated at all is naive at best. It may now be harder, but as click fraud has shown if there is enough incentive, anything is possible.
Ok, I had just finished writing up an easy way to bumb up your alexa stats but then I wiped it all off as I don't want to help brain dead spammers in any way and my guide would have done just that... However, I an still prove to you that "it is easy". Now if by "easy" you mean the English adjective that the dictionary explains as "not hard or difficult" then go any cheap PPC site (7search/miva etc, there's a billion out there) and buy cheap keywords. You can pay $0.01 per hit if you want. Buy a quadrillion hits. Now, that's not easy, that's VERY easy, but if you want brain dead easy, then buy traffic from sites like http://autohits.dk/ms.html you don't even have to set up a campaign, just pay and enter a link, it's a 3 minute operation that my 6 years old could do.