One of the coolest marketing blog measurements on earth has been degraded in our opinion. The AdAge Power 150 has been reworked in response to the loss of PostRank as a key component. Recently purchased by Google, PostRank shut down their API service. Collective Intellect, another key API used in the Power 150 formula, shuttered their API as well.  These sophisticated social signal aggregation and analysis API tools have been replaced in the AdAge Power 150 algorithm by a raw mashup of Facebook and Twitter which can be gamed. Yahoo Link data, and something called “Todd Score” have been there from the beginning. Alexa is also part of the scoring system, a service which some suggest is inaccurate.
Hundreds or even thousands of blogs take (took) great pride in scoring their progress, in the online marketing blog business, by how they fared in the ‘150. The metric kicked butt. AIMCLEAR Blog ranked as well as high 70’s and as low as 180 over the years, but that’s not the point.
What’s disturbing is that this particular incarnation of the AdAge Power 150, which presumably will evolve, is not in our opinion, fitting of its namesake AdAge Magazine’s, street credibility at this time.
PostRank is extremely sophisticated, a bleeding edge tool that aggregates and analyzes on and off-site social signals from numerous mainstream and emergent channels. Case in point: that’s the reason Google bought the company, ostensibly to leverage PostRank’s signal gathering and grading processes to support Google’s commitment to measuring social clues as search quality measurements. Removing PostRank from the Power 150 and replacing it with the current algorithm, seems a bit like threading a needle with a bulldozer.
We’re not alone in this opinion. Here are some comments from the AdAge Power 150 blog post, where the new “Do It Yourself” algorithm change was announced.
“There seems to be a major problem when blogs like {grow} have their correctly healed seat taken by a blog that has not been updated since 2009.”
-Justin Brackett
“… simply replacing Post Rank with just Twitter and Facebook is severely limiting the real reach of an article. What about considerations for the number of bookmarks from delicious or stumbleupon each article has had – or even integration with a klout score (given that the frequency and quality of posting is a significant factor in the score). I do hope that we’re going to see something a little more sophisticated than just Facebook and Twitter in the future.
– Paul Fabretti
“There are services like Triberr that artificially inflate the number of tweets a post receives, and Facebook’s weird Like option (where Likes of Likes count) mean that this metric is also skewed…“Seems a strange replacement.”
-Danny Brown
This post is in no way meant to be ungrateful to the AdAge 150’s creator, Todd Andrlik (Todd Score creator?), or manager, Charlie Moran. These guys, over time, have done the online marketing industry a great service by shining the mainstream light on blogs like AIMCLEAR. Our position in the 150 has brought us prestige and attention and we were proud of it. However, I’m sad to say, that we’ve removed the badge from our site. We just don’t believe in it as a standalone measure of being a great online marketing blog anymore. It’s tough to lose a friend the like AdAge Power 150.
Marty Weintraub is author of “Killer Facebook Ads” (Wiley/Sybex 2011) and CEO of AIMCLEAR®, an online marketing agency. He’s written extensively for respected Internet marketing trade publications including SearchEngineWatch, SearchEngineLand, SearchEngineRoundTable, and been quoted in many others. AIMCLEAR Blog (aimclearblog.com) has been cited as among the Technorati Top 10 Small Business Blogs, Cison Top Ten Social Media Blogs, PRWeb’s 25 Essential Public Relations Blogs You Should Be Reading.
