Traffic Comparisons for Squidoo, HubPages, Associated Content, suite101 and Xomba

I will try to do this every month or two, having a quick look at the Alexa traffic data for different revenue-sharing writing or article websites. Before I look at the traffic statistics just a few things to bear in mind. Alexa only measures traffic, not earnings potential. Whilst this may be a useful guide to the potential number of views your writing may get, it doesn't seem to (in my experience so far) bear much relationship with earnings. This, however, may have more to do with the article topics than with either the design or revenue-sharing formula of each site.

So here we go, these are the 3-month average Reaches for each site as a percentage of all internet traffic. I think the Reach is the best measure as it shows real comparisons whereas Rank is highly volatile and websites with similar traffic can appear to have very different Ranks. I have, however, included the Rank in brackets just to show this as well as whether traffic has gone up or down compared to the previous 3 months.

Squidoo.com = 0.148 (510) down
HubPages.com = 0.138 (595) up
AssociatedContent.com = 0.126 (769) up
suite101.com = 0.069 (1,641) up
Xomba.com = 0.029 (3,876) down/up

I have not included Triond as the data is not meaningful because they syndicate the articles across many different sites.

If I've missed out any websites that should be included then please leave a comment.

Squidoo has highly volatile traffic compared to all the other sites. I don't know why this should be.

The Xomba data shows that while the Reach has gone very slightly down its Rank has actually increased.

My highest earnings in the past 3 months have been from Xomba, but it is the site on which I write most as it was also the one with most immediate success.

So, have a plan in mind and keep an eye on both your own personal traffic and earnings. It could be that different communities have sprung up within different websites and hence that different subject areas will have more success. There is no magic formula, just experiment and see what works for you.