Who frequents a website is nearly as important as what the website says. It's interesting that Brietbart.com is in the top 500 most visited sites in America, but absolutely amazing that Breitbart visitors are more likely to be female and less likely to have a graduate level education - when compared to the average across the entire internet. Now I don't have enough experience to examine these statistics in depth, but I found them fascinating to think about, and hope you will too.

Now, in a fit of curiosity, I looked into Odyssey's Alexa rankings, and discovered quite a bit about the website. To begin with:

That's the Alexa ranking for Odyssey over the past year. It's absolutely incredible to see those massive spikes in ranking - A shift of several thousand ranks in what looks to be a matter of days! I could hardly understand it at first, and perhaps suspected some kind of error - or manipulation - but I realized that there were many reasons that there could be such a massive spike in usage.

For starters, the first spike in usage starts at the end of May into the start of June - Graduation time! The fall in ranking before is finals week, as many people are hunkering down, and the spike is when they finally have free time again! Once internet browsing is back on the menu, people are more able to share, view, read, and comment on all their favorite articles.

But then the question is this: Why does the ranking stay so high, then drop like a rock once April hits? For that second vertical line, I'm not 100% sure. The argument could be similar: since end of March and start of April is the lead-up to finals and graduation, perhaps there is a massive drop in interest or browsing time.

I was certainly scratching my head at this, but then I looked into how Alexa rankings are formulated: "Alexa’s Traffic Ranks are based on the traffic data provided by users in Alexa’s global data panel over a rolling 3 month period."

So rather than truly being a sudden spike or drop in ranking over the course of a few days, the truth is that the ranking likely has those large (but gradual) shifts over the course of multiple months, and the ranking only updates around April-June. Funny how statistics can make things look so ridiculous at times!

After my initial shock at the above image, I started to pay more attention to the statistics provided, and give them more thoughtful review. And really, most of the information is bursting with conclusions you could make.

For instance:

For most of the past year, a large majority of interest in The Odyssey didn't come from people searching for it. Most visitors to the Odyssey are people who know that it exists and are either: A. Going directly to it, or B. People clicking on links. This makes sense, considering how Odyssey propagates itself through user shares and a desire for going "viral." But in recent months readers of Odyssey articles are more and more coming through internet searches. Since this is a percentage, and we don't see raw numbers, it could be for any number of reasons. Maybe there's a drop in users - fewer shares means that there are fewer links spreading, which means you're less likely to The Odyssey pop up on your feeds. The effect of this is you're more likely to try and get your listicle fix through google or yahoo.

And when you do make a google search that leads to Odyssey, Alexa tracks what you were looking for! The top google searches that have led to Odyssey are:

1. Odyssey [of course]

2. Cute Animals [no surprise]

3. The Odyssey [I see a pattern!]

4. Fragrant Jewels [Sic]

5. Hamilton Quotes [Though Hamilton is everywhere, so not all that surprising]

I found it strange that so many people needed to google Odyssey to find it, but it makes sense. I know when I'm not paying attention, I'll plug "Odyssey" into my chrome bar and get here that way. The only truly surprising search is "Fragrant Jewels" but apparently that's the name of a bath bomb store that an Odyssey user (Odyssey-er? Odyssey-ite?) wrote an exposé about.

Alexa also lists the websites that are most similar to Odyssey in user demographics. Apparently Thought Catalog, HerCampus, EliteDaily, Bustle, and The Tab are all closely related. All of these websites are in some way oriented towards liberal college-aged women, which is certainly supported by my experience (and the data!).

The one disappointment I had with Alexa was that it didn't include ethnic information in its demographics. Odyssey is shown to skew heavily female (over twice as many female viewers than male), but there isn't anything about what percentage of users are white/black/latinx/asian... I have no doubt that it would be a largely white userbase, but shouldn't a website about giving a voice have more PoC?

Regardless, the one surprise I had from the demographics wasn't the education (largely none-college only), but the fact that users are reading Odyssey not at school, as expected, but at either work or home. I'm not sure what to make of that. Perhaps it's likely that a lot of schools have larger number of commuters, or students have internships that give them nothing to do.

Were there any surprises for you? Leave a comment and let us know!