Ranking these companies based on their website traffic is misleading at best. For example, #12 is a software vendor that just hit $100M in sales. It's clearly doing much better than similarly ranked companies.
So different subdomains are different startups?
seriously wtf?
P.S: diego, you are right anyway. This post is surely written by an author who wrote it just for the sake of writing a blogpost not out of intention to share something interesting. Plain link bait
"Sites from startup-australia.org are ranked and listed below. If you think that a site is missing, or that one oughtn’t be included on the list, then feel free to edit the wiki.
Sites are ranked based on an average of Alexa and Compete traffic data."
So:
1) They don't compile the list, only rank the people on it. The Startup Australia wiki appears to be an openly editable list of startups. If you have a problem with who is on it, change it.
2) The data comes from Alexa and Compete so your point about random sites with little traffic is retarded.
3) The landing site has no advertising, so why would they bother link-baiting?
It's not the best list, but then again what does it matter? No one is going to win anything for being on it, so take it for what it appears to be, a fun resource for those of us interested in the Australian tech startup scene.
Rather than promote the scene, lists like this make it starkly apparent just how little startup activity there is in AU.
On seeing a headline like this my first reaction is always "there are 100 startups in Australia??", followed upon reading the list by "apparently not".
The rankings of some of those sites are a real worry. A site with an Alexa rank > 1000000 doesn't deserve to be on a top list of anything.
For the one that I am most familiar with (Goodbarry), traffic to the site is not an indicator of anything. You might as well measure visits to their office.
It irritates me when I see a list of startups with traffic estimates beside them. (A) Traffic doesn't necessarily indicate anything. (B) Traffic isn't a useful comparison unless they are doing the same thing. IE if you are comparing newspapers to newspapers or online Shops to online shops, fine. But this is comparing one company selling enterprise software at 20k per customer (that may never see the site) to one selling books online to another that writes a blog. It's ridiculous.
As a general indicator of "traction", I don't mind the use of traffic estimates per se.
But for comparing AU sites, these numbers are near enough to useless, because they measure "global" traffic (in practice mainly USA traffic), and make no allowance for AU-specific traffic patterns.
Our site (yet to be properly launched) has an Alexa rank higher than Docoloco and a Compete rank higher than OzBargain. I know for a fact our actual traffic is much lower than these sites, and it's the relatively small volume of USA traffic we've been getting that has skewed the stats.
Yes, it would be interesting to see the latter for Aussie web startups. You've got to wonder about a list that excludes Atlassian and Campaign Monitor. It should also list Stateless Systems rather than their products (cushycms, bugmenot, etc)
yep and on a global startup ranking google would be listed with all its products, not broken into separate products like feedburner, blogger, gmail etc. BTW I think Atlassian is on the list, though Campaign Monitor appears not to be.
http://blogs.atlassian.com/news/2009/02/from_startup_to.html
Also, calling this site a startup (#42) seems like a stretch:
http://www.deadharddrive.com/
There seem to be several random websites with little traffic on the list, I just clicked on this one at random.