Alexa Says Goodbye to Amazon

Alexa Internet — a service for web analytics — is getting canceled. It will become history on May 1st, 2022.

The legendary web-analysis tool dubbed Alexa Internet is retiring. It was founded as a startup in 1996 and three years later was purchased by Amazon.

The name of Amazon’s smart voice assistant was directly inspired by this service. Seemingly, Amazon planned to launch a whole series of hi-tech products, which would have “Alexa” as a prefix.

The service was often referred to by many authors, researchers, and platforms. Namely, Wikipedia would use the Alexa Rank a lot. This sub-service ranked the most popular websites in the world.

The primary source of data for Alexa Internet was a small percentage of users, who agreed to install its browser extension. Then Alexa would track down their search requests, browser history, and so on.

Later, these stats would be revealed to companies, entrepreneurs, and merchants to understand the customers’ habits, preferences, and tastes.

Alexa Internet was sometimes accused of delivering inaccurate data, as well as criticized for intruding on the user’s privacy. (Even though people agreed to install the extension voluntarily).

Today, services like Alexa Internet lose their relevance as eCommerce migrates to social media and messengers. Tracking customer data inside these apps is much easier and faster.

The clients who purchased the Alex Internet subscription have time to export the data they need and erase their accounts. In the farewell post, the company said:

Thank you for making us your go-to resource for content research, competitive analysis, keyword research, and so much more.

At the same time, Amazon experiments with other products, introducing an intelligent home robot named Astro. But, according to some project participants, it will be able only to “throw itself down the stairs”.

Do you think the era of old online marketing is nearing its end? Let us know in the comments!