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What is the real story with Alexaholic/Statsaholic/Amazon?

The Alexa vs. Statsaholic story, in response to which I proposed a boycott of the Amazon eCommerce API, is getting complicated. Pete Cashmore has a petition on Mashable, calling on Amazon and Statsaholic to settle the dispute without litigation.

It emerged in comments however (see comments by James), that statsaholic was not using the Alexa API (which charges fees), but was instead scraping, or otherwise circumventing the API. James points readers to the Alexa Blog post on the topic in which Alexa takes issue with:

Trademark infringement via the “Alexa”holic name. Though Alexaholic has changed its name, Alexa points out that Statsaholic still redirects the Alexaholic domain to the new site - a remedy that is not satisfactory to Alexa. Personally, I think Alexa forfeited their rights to demand restitution from Statsaholic by allowing the use of the Alexaholic domain for years, and explicitly stating that they were aware of the Alexaholic, and supportive of it. Alexa should be content with the Statsaholic switch and call it a lesson learned on trademark protection.
Alexa also takes issue with Statsaholic’s use of graphs. The Alexa fee-based API (AWIS)does not include graphs - so statsaholic apparently (more-or-less) hotlinks them. This issue has the ring of legitimacy to it. The charts and the system to produce them consume resources, and the IP behind the charting system has value. If Statsaholic used paid AWIS data and their own charting engine, their wouldn’t be a problem. But it seems that Statsaholic is doing neither.

IN summary: (a) Statsaholic is entited to the Statsaholic name, and traffic from Alexaholic. (b) If Statsaholic is a viable business, it can afford to put out for its own chart rendering engine, and pay for use of AWIS data. To be honest, that sound preferable anyway - there’s a lot more opportunity to add value to data when you’re completely in control of presentation; and, that would give Statsaholic the opportunity to blend with data from other sources, creating a superior metric.

In any event, I don’t think Alexa needed to resort to litigation to get this ball rolling, but I don’t know both sides of the story. Pete C. suggests in response to James in comments that Alexa tried to up-charge Statsaholic, asking for more than the standard AWIS fees - is this substantiated?

alexa, alexaholic, amazon, awis, mashable statsaholic

2 Responses to “What is the real story with Alexaholic/Statsaholic/Amazon?”

Alan Graham | April 20th, 2007 at 12:44 pm

Hi, I wrote the original ZDNet post that broke the suit. Here’s the thing that really gets me miffed about this…

Alexaholic builds something great that even Alexa praises. Alexa let’s it run for a year. During that time, Alexa takes some of Alexaholic’s ideas…which hey…a lot of people borrow from each other in the web 2.0 space. But once Alexaholic starts gaining better traction…all of a sudden now Alexa has an issue over it.

It just smells funny.
Rod | April 20th, 2007 at 1:08 pm

Hey Allan - thanks for commenting. I agree - it does seem very fishy - there’s nothing to praise in Amazon’s behaviour here. Letting someone make use of your content/functionality until they are popular and then pulling out the rug from under them seems like a very poor way to do business, regardless of the legitimacy of amazon’s claims.

It will be interesting to watch and see how this shakes out…