Now that the changes are in place to support RealRank within PayPerPost.com I wanted to take a moment to explain some aspects clearly.
First of all, the rank itself. You can see the RealRank for your blogs on the My Blogs page within the application, as shown below. If the system has not yet assigned you a rank, you'll see N/A. The Izea RealRank engine runs at 2am each morning (it's a slow time for the systems) and aggregates information from our Tracker system to come up with the RealRank for each of your blogs.
The key for this to happen, is to have the Izea Toolkit installed on your blog. Just click on the Get Code button on the My Blogs page. This will take you to an instructions page to walk you through getting the code and installing it on your blog. The Izea Toolkit sends data for each visitor to your blog to our Tracker systems - without it installed, we can't record your traffic data.
The RealRank is a flat rank. We calculate a score for each blog we track, and then sort the resulting scores to assign each blog a rank form 1 to n. For opportunity segmentation though we normalize the rank.
When creating an opportunity, advertisers are asked to select a rank from 1 through 9. This really equates to a percentage of the marketplace to exclude from an opportunity. If an advertiser chooses a 9, they are effectively excluding 90% of the marketplace and only allowing people in the top 10% of the ranks into the opportunity.
When a blogger looks at the opportunity details we show them the value the advertiser chose, and explain what it means. For example "9 (top 10%)".
Obviously if your rank improves (remember, we calculate it daily), you could find yourself qualifying into opportunities that you previously weren't eligible for. Similarly, if you find opportunities segmented based on RealRank that you do qualify for, it's in your interests to take that opportunity rapidly; you may get pipped to the post tomorrow by a more popular site.
We currently don't show you however where you are in the network. We don't for example show your rank and the total that it's out of. When the Izea RealRank site launches though we will expose a lot more information to you to let you accurately identify your place in the grand scheme of things.
And, that's all there is to it.
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Comments (RSS)
Daethian said...
This sounds great! Will be nice to be ranked against my peers :D
Nov 20, 2007 9:19:07 PM
Darlene said...
This is a great one! I am very excited! Keep it up PPP!
Nov 20, 2007 9:59:16 PM
David Mackey said...
Okay idea, but I imagine you lost a lot of big-time bloggers who are scared of getting penalized by Google. PageRank still matters.
Nov 20, 2007 10:08:16 PM
brad said...
Im sorta confused, so you are either limited by page rank and alexa or Real Rank? If not you could effectively be screwed if your real rank qualifes you for a high paying op but PR takes your out at the knees...
Nov 20, 2007 10:50:57 PM
Jenn said...
So what about Page Rank? Please tell me that you'll be removing the ability to segment by PR!
Nov 20, 2007 10:58:22 PM
Suzanne said...
What if your blog host (such as livejournal) isn't compatable with the ppp tools? Am I about to be excluded out of even more offers than I already am?
Nov 20, 2007 11:03:14 PM
mistipurple said...
Sorry, have to ask what you mean by.. "For opportunity segmentation though we normalize the rank."
I am so excited and frighten at the same time. It's like waiting for my exam results, lol!
A big thank you to everyone at Izea for putting this through.
Nov 20, 2007 11:04:47 PM
Beautiful Minds said...
Thats really cool.. but sad for those sites with high PR and a little low traffic.
What about the geographic location of the blog? will that matter? and geographic segmentation of readers?
Nov 20, 2007 11:21:31 PM
Karah said...
If we changed our code for the Argus testing... do we need to change it back now?
- Karah
www.trackbunnyfilms.com
Nov 20, 2007 11:23:17 PM
abelle said...
i'm excited yet afraid to see the results. i'm still hoping it will work with mine :(
http://abelle.blogrox.com/2007/11/21/real-ranking-by-realrank/
Nov 21, 2007 12:17:22 AM
Irene said...
"it's in your interests to take that opportunity rapidly; you may get pipped to the post tomorrow by a more popular site."
Oh dear... does this mean I write halfway and my rank changed, then when I submit, I can't submit anymore? -.-'
Nov 21, 2007 2:12:15 AM
syikin said...
hmm.. another ranking system.. but what happen when advertisers wants high google PR and high real rank? it will cause low ranking bloggers grit their teeth...
Nov 21, 2007 2:29:28 AM
Pete Wright said...
brad: Kinda. We have, for now at least, left PageRank in there. PageRank and RealRank are not mutually exclusive. RealRank is just a heck of a lot better.
We will be working to educate advertisers of that fact, but ultimately you are still going to find some advertisers in the system that really want to use PageRank.
Nov 21, 2007 4:43:45 AM
Pete Wright said...
jenn: We are looking into removing PageRank, yes. It has not been removed right now because there is a learning curve that we will need to help some advertisers climb in terms of explaining how value-less pagerank is, and how great RealRank is.
Suzanne: As I said in a previous post, if your blog host does not support you using Javascript inside your blog templates, then I'm afraid we can't rank you. It pays a lot of dividend to really consider moving to your own dedicated domain and a self hosted solution in the longer term though. You get more flexibility and control of your blog and less chance an advertiser will ultimately segment you out of an opp because you are in an undesirable blogging neighborhood.
mistipurple: RealRank moves each day. Today it could be from 1 to 10,000, while tomorrow it could be from 1 to 5,000,000. With that in mind we can't have an advertiser enter an arbitrary number to segment on - it would mean nothing. Instead we break the RealRanks down into 10 groups. Advertisers creating an opportunity can pick a number from 1 to 9, which is of course analogous to PageRank and something most people are familiar with, and we apply that to mean a 'percentage' of the network to exclude. A value of 6, for example, means exclude 60% of the network, include the remaining 40%.
Beautiful Minds: That's the whole point. This is a RealRank. If you have a very high PR site, but no traffic, then that once again shows that PageRank is a very weak indicator of your blog's traffic and popularity. RealRank does not take into account geography - it's a global indicator - but opportunities could of course be limited based on geography, just as they always could.
Karah: No.
Irene: No. RealRank is calculated once per day, at 2am Eastern time. While it is feasible it could change on you while you are writing, it's unlikely.
syikin: We'll be working on getting the message out that that would not be a good thing to do, over the next few days. We are looking at the future and considering removing PageRank altogether, but ultimately (in PPP.com at least) that's something we need to elicit a lot more feedback from advertisers about (it's in their interests just as much as yours, to stop using Page Rank).
Nov 21, 2007 4:53:20 AM
papajoneh said...
So, is higher number better or the opposite? is 300 better than 600 or the opposite? Still confused with all this numbers.
Nov 21, 2007 6:10:33 AM
Pete Wright said...
papajoneh: Ok, In terms of the actual real rank, a lower number greater than 0 is best. 0 means we didn't assign you a rank because you have no traffic to measure, etc etc. 1 would be the best blog in the network. 1,000,000 would be the worse, if we were measuring 1,00,000 blogs.
On the advertiser side though we had to come up with a way to make RealRank usable in segmentation that was not too much of a leap from the Google Page rank way of doing things. So we use numbers 1 through 9
9 = Target top 10%
8 = Target top 20%
7 = Target top 30%
.
.
.
2 = Target top 80%
1 = Target top 90%
Nov 21, 2007 6:15:22 AM
Wilson said...
This sounds interesting PPP!.... Keep it up!...c",)
Nov 21, 2007 6:16:26 AM
Rollo said...
How long before we see RealRank make a difference in the number of opps that we qualify for? If an advertiser may still choose to segment by PR and also by RealRank, could it be possible that they may effectively exclude most of the bloggers? Will advertisers be alerted to the possibility that their opps might get limited exposure for this reason?
It makes sense for advertisers to segment by RealRank as it takes traffic into account. After all, a post seen by 20 people is more effective in advertising than a post seen by 1 person, regardless of the PR of the blog on which it was published.
Nov 21, 2007 7:12:40 AM
Corrin said...
I'm anxious to see the ratings of others. Right now the numbers are arbitrary without any benchmarks.
Nov 21, 2007 7:24:11 AM
Robert said...
Mine is listed at 78 - where does that fit in with 1-9?
9 = Target top 10%
8 = Target top 20%
7 = Target top 30%
.
.
.
2 = Target top 80%
1 = Target top 90%
Nov 21, 2007 7:27:36 AM
blackyard.net said...
Looks good so far, let keep our fingers crossed.
Nov 21, 2007 8:05:22 AM
Jennifer said...
My question -- my rankings in the my blogs tab stopped automatically updating a long time ago. It doesn't matter if I log in/log out daily or not, they don't update until I ask for them to be done manually. Is my realrank going to sit there stagnant with the rest of them?
Nov 21, 2007 8:06:55 AM
Melissa Markham said...
Terrific!
Nov 21, 2007 8:30:19 AM
Lisa said...
Pete, here's another question. My blog and this IZEA blog entry are both throwing error codes up on my end. It happens every time I refresh. Any ideas?
"itk.socialspark.com has sent an incorrect or unexpected message. Error code -12263"
Nov 21, 2007 9:47:44 AM
Lisa said...
And not it's not doing it. Figures! ;-)
Nov 21, 2007 10:00:50 AM