Impact of Museum Websites - a comparison using Alexa

Dear Shelley,

My point in posting is to generate discussion, not to promote Alexa or any other source of data. From my perspective, what is interesting is not to compare data sources - none of which give a 'true' picture - but to look at what any source can tell us with intra-source comparisons. Those of you in a specific museum will, of course, want to look more in depth at all the sources that together can tell you something about your own institution, including in house logs and door counts and post-visit surveys. For both these purposes, I'm quite happy that the posting is bringing out issues with data and what can best be done with different sources.

David Bearman

The 'rank' comparison could be useful even if the experience of visiting in person and online are very different. After all, rank is about degree of recognition. Nevertheless, I'd agree that we ought to look more to comparisons within the online experience or within the in-person experience.

What does it mean, for instance, that the Newseum online visits average 3.2 minutes while the Smithsonian and the Metropolitan Museum of Art average 2.6 minutes? Those are statistically highly meaningful differences. Are the three institutions attempting to create different kinds of user experiences?

Similarly, it is interesting (and surprising) that the Newseum gets 46% of its visitors from the USA while the Smithsonian gets 63% and the Met draws 61% Americans. Why is the Newseum drawing so much of an international audience when the two premier institutions are seemingly parochial? What does it mean that MOMA has 52% American visitors (or, I ask, that archimuse.com has less than 37% US based visitors)?

Exploring comparisons within the online visit will probably prove fruitful.

David Bearman

thanks Perian for spotting the de Young  / Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco correspondence that i missed. [it bothered me a bit that 'the thinker' wasn't there. but i'd forgotten the other name!]

correction / update coming shortly.

/jt

j. trant archives & museum informatics www.archimuse.com

Thankfully I didn't have to look through 500,000 sites - only about 1000. I did a search for 'museums' in Alexa setting the limit at those ranked 1 to  1M. Then I eliminated from that list those that are returned by the term museum but aren't museums (search engines, wikipedia, commercial sites, etc.) and I constructed this list with those ranked up to 500,000.

The method has quite a few problems that I know of.

First, as you will find if you replicate it or search any one of these museums, the rank is a rolling three month average so it changes daily - not much but some, and there are definitely those going up and down in the ranks. More importantly, Alexa data are based on what Alexa can track, and thus are different from other measures such as Google search rank etc.

Second, the term 'museum' searched in Alexa excludes some organizatiuons that ICOM would consider museums, such as some 'sports halls of fame 'and 'zoos' that would have been in the top 500,000. For example, I found (on 09/06/09) using 'hall of fame':       
National Baseball Hall of Fame    http://www.baseballhalloffame.org    156,844
Pro Football Hall of Fame    http://www.profootballhof.com      181,150

and using 'zoo' :      
San Diego Zoo    http://www.sandiegozoo.org    32,597
Zoologischer Garten Berlin    http://www.zoo-berlin.de    202,003
Woodland Park Zoo    http://www.zoo.org    215,784

The third issue is that there are lots of associated statistics in Alexa that are more meaningful - length of visit for example, that are ignored here.

But in a gross way the data are still intriguing, and I ithink museum web staff will look deeper into the data on their own. It is one way of discovering whether the changes we make to our sites are having an impact. 

David