IZEA Ranks - Terrible Blog Metric Service

Posted on January 22nd, 2008 in Retards

Last week, IZEA, proud owner of PayPerPost, the widely hated service that lets merchants pay bloggers to give them good product reviews, released IZEA Ranks.  Izea ranks is supposed to give a more accurate ranking of traffic and backlinks than Google Pagerank and Alexa.  Keep in mind, that they still describe their service as being in “Alpha” so hopefully some of this stuff will change, but the system is seriously flawed, and in some ways scary.  Here are the reasons why you should remove this service from your blog if you have already installed it.

Page Load Time Increase

In order to be ranked by Izea Ranks, you are required to install a piece of javascript on your page, supposedly to track your traffic.  The one line piece of javascript seems harmless enough, but it actually proceeds to load 82kb worth of javascript before anything else on the page is even loaded.  In tests on nickycakes.com, the Izea javascript code (actually 4 pieces of javascript are loaded by Izea) caused a…get this…. 43% Load Time Increase on the front page.   Keep in mind for a second that nickycakes.com is terribly optimized (red: not optimized at all) for load times, so for some pages that are designed properly, this will cause an even bigger increase percentage wise. To put things into perspective, the files are roughly 10 times larger than the javascript loaded by Google Analytics.  Screenshot of Firebug stats for loading the javascript:

Potential Credibility Issues

So how is this service supposed to work if not everyone is using it?  The reason that people rely on metrics provided by Google and Alexa is that they judge EVERYONE’s website, regardless of if they want to be judged or not.  With IZEA, only the people who install the software are going to be included in the listing, which makes it’s reliability pretty much nothing right off the bat. Any site ranking high on Izea’s ranking system will already be ranking high in Alexa, so what’s the point exactly?

 Scary Javascript Code

So what exactly is packed into that 82k of javascript?  Here’s a few cute functions they included:

function ppp_set_up_sponsorship()
function ppp_generatePopup()
function ppp_mouse_trail() (tracks mouse movements)
function ppp_createCookie(name,value,days)
function ppp_readCookie(name)
function ppp_eraseCookie(name)

So what’s that all mean?  Well, first of all, they’re tracking much more than just basic visitor information.  They have functions setup to track everything the user does while on your page and upload it back to them.  Mouse movements, ad clicks, everything.  They can essentially play back each user’s visit and watch the mouse movements and clicks on your page in real time if they want to.  But why would they want to do that?  How would that benefit them?  Well, let’s take a little peek at the privacy policy, shall we?

“We may share with third parties certain pieces of aggregated, non-personal information, such as the number of users who searched for a particular term, for example, or how many users clicked on a particular advertisement. Such information does not identify you individually.”

So yeah, they can sell your visitor’s data to 3rd parties.  Hope you’re cool with that.

And how about the cookie functions?  What potential problems could that create?  Well, they can create cookies on the user’s hard drive with whatever they want, and it will be coming from your domain.  That’s not terribly bad.  They could erase your session cookies or something, but that wouldn’t really do too much.  The scary part is, they have functions set up to READ cookies from the user’s hard drive from your domain.  For those less technically inclined, this means they can steal your session information and hack into your blog, at will.  Hope you’re cool with that too.

Anytime they choose, they could insert their own ads into your page, install popup ads on your blog, whatever.  They’ve already got all the code ready to go.

Not to mention, the entire thing is half stolen from qwirksmode and half sloppily coded so poorly that it creates noticeable resource hogging due to function calls every time the window is resized, scrollbar is moved, etc (all this information is recorded for sending back to IZEA).

So, long story short, this service will never be a really reliable metric for ranking blogs, and you should probably get rid of the code immediately if you haven’t already.