When I posted the Alexa traffic ranking for sites in Ethiopia, titled Top 100 sites in Ethiopia, I was not sure whether to brag about the ranking of this site. Because, I know a couple of sites are not accessible in Ethiopia. And, I was not sure whether and how far that affected the ranking of other sites. The only way to find out is to look into the Top 1 million sites list of Alexa, the web ranking site. Indeed, I downloaded the data about a month ago, but I only checked at the ranking of a couple sites, since there is no quick way to sort out the Ethiopia-related sites among the one million sites listed in there.

However, some of the comments I received, following my post, claimed, with an amazing level of certainty, that ‘the inaccessibility of some opposition websites in Ethiopia boosted the ranking of other sites.’ Really? If so, how far? Answering that question forced me to look into the Global ranking of Ethiopian sites in the Alexa list of the Top 1 million sites.

But how do you make a quick review of a 1 million long list?
1st/ I gathered the Ethiopian sites from the Top 100 sites in Ethiopia listed on my previous post.
2nd/ I collected some 51 Ethiopian sites from Google-news, the Bookmarks on my browser and my recollection.
Then, I checked the Global rank and Ethiopian rank of each sites, which is presented in the table below.

Here I made two assumptions: The first is that since the sites are focused on Ethiopian issues, their visitors are Ethiopian residents or Ethiopian diasporas. (But this assumption might be wrong for some sites) Another assumption is that all those listed below are owned by Ethiopians, since I have no way of knowing how many of them are run by the government of Eritrea or Egypt.

The result is mixed, as you can see below. It is curious, how some sites might have fared, had they been accessible in Ethiopia. The Global ranking of ethiopianreview.com, and nazret.com, is among the top 100,000. However, the two sites are seldom accessible in Ethiopia. Assuming Ethiopian residents have the same taste as the diasporas, we can conjure the two sites might have gotten high number of visitors in Ethiopia if they were accessible. But not necessarily. Ethiopian residents are by far moderate in their political views and more likely to detect blatant lies regarding events in the country. Thus, sites like ethiopianreview are unlikely to get a larger audience or, if they get some, it would plummet as soon as the site posts a bogus story or photo about Addis Ababa, as it usually does.

[Read my article about internet filtering in Ethiopia, to be posted, on this blog, this weekend]
Note that: The Global rank data is taken from the Nov. 27/2010, Alexa data of Top 1 million sites, since I couldn’t download the latest 10MB data from Alexa, due to poor connection in the last few days. However, I made random checks for a couple sites and their ranking is still the same the same.

Global and Ethiopian Rank of 51 Ethiopian sites

Note that the list is not exhaustive, there may be Ethiopian sites with a better ranking but not included here. Please inform me if there is a site that you believe should have been included in this list.