The VinePair Wine Web Power Index measures the influence of selected wine websites and mobile apps within the United States. We looked at web traffic, social media influence and organic search relevance to produce our scores. The first edition of the VWWPI analyzed 33 wine-focused publications, forums and mobile applications.

Want to hear about what we learned? Jump down to our observations. Otherwise learn more about how we constructed the VWWPI below the chart.

Our Influence Formula

Choosing the data weighting is inherently subjective. We believe that social media, at least in terms of consumer (and to a lesser extent industry) influence is extremely important, hence the relatively high weighting.



The Weighting: “45% Traffic Score (Alexa US Rank) + 35% Social Score (Facebook Fans + Twitter Followers) + 5% Moz Domain Authority + 10% Moz Unique Linking Domains.”

We are well aware of the issues with Alexa data (see caveats below), which is why we also included the data points from Moz’s Open Site Explorer web crawl.

Our Data Sources

We used publicly available data, collected on Dec 11, 2013 and Dec 12, 2013. The Moz Open Site Explorer Data is from the Dec 10, 2013 crawl. Data was manually collected. In the short term we intend to update our index manually; over the long term we may automate our data collection to allow for a daily updated index.

Our Observations

How We Selected Who To Include

Putting together an index like this is inherently subjective. If you believe we’ve excluded a property that belongs in the list, please let us know. Without diving into the why or why not of every wine related website on the Internet, we’ll address some properties we considered, but ultimately excluded:

Cellar Tracker – While they are a large and influential brand, they really are a unique property that exists in its own category.

– While they are a large and influential brand, they really are a unique property that exists in its own category. Decanter – While we enjoy reading Decanter they’re focused on the UK.

– While we enjoy reading Decanter they’re focused on the UK. Palate Press – We decided to look at the individual influential websites within their ad network.

– We decided to look at the individual influential websites within their ad network. James Suckling’s web venture, which we won’t be linking to. All that needs to be said about the man has been said elsewhere…and we’ll leave it at that.

[toggle hide=”yes” border=”yes” style=”white” title_open=”Raw Data & Feedback” title_closed=”Raw Data & Feedback”]In the table below you can see our raw data. Have a better way to weight the data, or more to include? We’d love see what you have in mind. If you do produce a different set please let us know.

[/toggle][toggle hide=”yes” border=”yes” style=”white” title_open=”Caveats” title_closed=”Caveats”]

Although we collected Quantcast traffic ranks, we ultimately excluded it from the index, despite our hope to account for Alexa outliers with a second dataset. We did so as for many lower traffic sites Quantcast data did not exist.

When a property did not have an Alexa US rank we used their global rank.

A couple of properties that do not have a Facebook presence, do have a public, personal presence belonging to the owner of the property. When appropriate and available we used the number of their ‘Followers.’

Based upon directly measured Quantcast data, we believe that Alexa is likely undercounting The Reverse Wine Snob’s traffic. We believe this is also the case for Dr. Vino .

traffic. We believe this is also the case for . We recognize that mobile apps have additional, valuable datapoints to use for comparison. While we believe the relative ranks of the mobile apps included in the Index are accurate, we intend to dive deeper into the world of wine-related mobile apps in the near future!

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The Raw Data



Update*

We’ve been overwhelmed by the feedback today and we wanted to provide a quick update. We enjoyed doing this, reading some interesting discussions, and we plan to release a full update sometime next year.

A note from Josh on the new data: There are some well-known, large websites that regularly write about wine. We at VinePair love a number of them. However comparing them against purely wine-oriented websites doesn’t seem fair. You can find our scores for six additional properties in the second tab of the embedded raw data, although we want to strongly note that this data was recorded today, whereas the original set is from the 12th. And now some more notes & caveats — based upon directly measured Quantcast data we believe that our score for Enobytes is dragged down by the lack of US-only Alexa data. Alexa’s data appears to be undercounting Hello Vino. We believe Wine Maps, to a lesser extent is also scoring lower than it should. As to the original exclusion of Robert Parker’s website, that was an editorial decision we took.