i wonder if/how this affects the Wayback Machine...

also, i thought it was unusual that the Alexa Internet wikipedia page hasn't been updated to mention this yet.

>affects Wayback

I think maybe not so much, it looks like the flow of data from Alexa > Wayback stopped around this time last year
[archive.org...]

>wikipedia

I see it has been edited today but nothing on this article. Not sure how prevalent Alexa is anymore, a lot of people seem to use similarweb.

They didn't offer to sell it?

the Alexa brand name is far too valuable to Amazon.

It wouldn't surprise me if they repurposed the domain.

Alexa may be gone, but the domain is pure gold...

This is sad news. I know some people did not trust the accuracy of Alexa but I found it to be quite useful and accurate to a great extent. Unfortunate that Amazon owned them...this is a rounding error on their balance sheet. Selling the company is logical but to them makes no difference. They could have just changed the name..perhaps the data is too useful to their competition...smaller e-commerce merchants.

a lot of people seem to use similarweb

... since Google owns the entire internet, it only makes sense that people use it.

Nobody should be surprised, it's a sound business decision.

Value comes from influence and on rthat front Alexa.com had very little. What little it had came from webmasters, a notoriously stingy bunch.

It was like an airline where the transportation side of business loses money but they keep doing it because the influence of their rewards programs are cash cows, literally. Even the biggest airlines will tell you that the valuation of the airline side of things is half, or less, the value of their rewards programs which are all subsidiaries of the main business. The rewards programs make twice as much money with influence as the airlines do. - [youtube.com...]

Alexa.com became irrelevant as a website and never found a way to leverage the users it did get. The metrics apply to us all.

All websites are essentially worthless unless they can get people to seperate themselves from the dollars in their wallets, or from other things of value, like a vote or relationship. Information is often just a loss leader, as it was in this case.

I had many experiences with Alexa. One of them, my daughters wanted to a photo shooting for models.
Ok, after this, they wanted, that I pay for a contract to manage them.
I showed them the Alexa rank beyond 15 million of this agency, �Do You really think a site with this Alexa rank can do something for You?�.
At this time, I had an Alexa rank in the top 100,000.

It has been an awesome tool to track competitors.. a great loss.

It is not accurate as much as the original data but it is do helpful for competitor analysis and rough traffic estimation. Sorry to heat that

Much of Alexa's data came from ISP's that shared cache data. With the move to HTTPS, ISP's lost much of that tracking capability. The only big thing they still have to track is DNS requests.

Although I recognize the name / domain from way back, I have no idea what alexa is or was. Was it a search engine (or did it operate a crawler of any sort)? Would I see it in my web-logs? Or maybe I've been blocking it (by IP) without knowing?

From the browser side, would it be a domain that might be blocked by any number of brower add-ons, ad-blockers or a hosts file? Or was it not really hooked into your average website code?

They also got data from their browser extension. I worked at a place where the owners wanted to "rank" better on Alexa.com, so they had IT push the extension to every workstation in the building and changed the default home page in the default browser to their company domain. (Ineffective) SEO tricks, old school style.

Results where never accurate..
Even for our competitors who managed servcies..