Yesterday sparks light up the web when the guys over at Izea, PayPerPost’s parent company, announced that they would be introducing a new metric to gauge the importance and popularity of any given website called RealRank.
This is obviously a response to Google’s PageRank punishment of those who have been found selling paid post, which incidentally Izea’s core services revolve around. While it is easy to understand the reasoning behind introducing this type of feature in an attempt to step away from relying on Google’s PageRank system, this is not the way to go, and I will be more than happy to explain to you why that is the case.
First, let’s take a look at what this ranking system will be based on. The following is quoted directly from Izea’s announcement of the system:
70% weighted towards visitors per day
20% weighted towards amount of ACTIVE inbound links per day
10% weighted towards pageviews per day
It is, just as they state themselves, a relatively simple formula. Now before we jump to any conclusions, it is imperative that we consider the reasoning behind introducing this system. As it is meant to be a direct competitor to Google PageRank, and considering that the core services of Izea, as mentioned before, revolves around advertising, some obvious conclusions can be drawn.
They have previously used PageRank as a factor when pricing advertisements from any site participating in PayPerPost, and such it is reasonable to believe that Izea RealRank will aim to replace it. The first and most obvious flaw that surfaces is that it does not say anything about the value of an ad at a certain site. The reason PageRank became a powerful metric in the first place, is because it says something about how much authority Google attributes a given site, and therefore indirectly how much authority a link from that certain site will to the site at the other end of that link.
Naturally the RealRank will not give any indication of what benefits you can expect from advertising at a certain website or blog in terms of search engine rankings. Right about now you are probably ready to shout out that this new metric will still give us a good overview of the popularity of a website or blog, and that is certainly a fair point.
Unfortunately however, it is in this case moot. First and foremost because it will simply be too easy to manipulate the numbers. Anyone with $10 to spend per day can simply pay someone to do some social media manipulation which will artificially increase the number of unique visitors per day well into the thousands. Not to mention the possibilites of the numerous amount of traffic exchange programs out there, which will do the same for no cost at all.
The worst part of it all? Nobody can be accused of cheating the system here, because a rank that relies severely on unique visitors is subjected to these fundamental flaws, and that is why RealRank should not and hopefully will not be used by advertisers when shopping for adspace. If the future proves otherwise however, I can assure you that traffic and link exchange programs will get a swift and grand ressurection. Ultimately this would lead to a lot of people making much more money from their websites than they should be, and advertisers throwing their money into black holes of no return.
What is the solution then, you might ask? Well, judging from a post by Andy Beard regarding Izea’s new advertising platform Social Spark, they might actually be heading in the right direction already. Andy explains that this new platform will display current statistics such as CTR (Click Through Rates) for the site or blog to those considering investing in ads at that given site.
This is obviously what buying advertisements should be based on, because when someone wants to buy an ad, they do not do it out of generosity and because they feel a blogger deserves to afford an extra Happy Meal that day. No, they do it because they want to spend money to make more money, and click through rates and conversion rates are what gives a good indication of whether or not this is a likely outcome or not when they buy an ad.
Believe it or not, advertising at a blog with 500 dedicated readers per day can be ten times worth the money compared to advertising at a blog with 5,000 daily readers who do not notice the ads at all. And that is why we need a system that reflects the conversions, rather than another one which is really just based on artifically inflated fluff.