Top Magic Sites On The WWW

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Tabman
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Top Magic Sites On The WWW

Postby Tabman » January 14th, 2005, 6:33 pm

Does anybody know the top magic sites on the web??? Top dealers sites??? Top dealers on the web???

TIA,

-=tabman

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Pete Biro
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Re: Top Magic Sites On The WWW

Postby Pete Biro » January 14th, 2005, 6:47 pm

Genii, Tabman Tables, petebiro.com -- should be enuf.
Stay tooned.

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Tabman
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Re: Top Magic Sites On The WWW

Postby Tabman » January 14th, 2005, 6:54 pm

I love you Pete!!!! I'm still laughing!!!

-=tabman

cataquet
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Re: Top Magic Sites On The WWW

Postby cataquet » January 15th, 2005, 4:53 am

I don't think statistics are kept on this stuff, tabman. My guess for top dealer is probably Hocus Pocus; they always have specials and are regular e-mail advertisers. A bit behind are Denny & Lee, and Hank Lee. Hank tends to have everything, and if you're looking for something, he's probably got it when no one else has it. Hocus Pocus is more the place to go for the latest stuff... A frequent mention (although not generally favorable) is made of Penguin Magic. They tend to cater for the entry level magician.

However, this is all just speculation

Ben Bishop
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Re: Top Magic Sites On The WWW

Postby Ben Bishop » January 15th, 2005, 3:43 pm

There is a "Top 100 Websites" list on www.allmagicguide.com

I don't know what their criteria is, but it's as good a place as any to start.

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Tabman
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Re: Top Magic Sites On The WWW

Postby Tabman » January 16th, 2005, 8:43 am

Thanks for the tips most kind sirs, I appreciate it. I don't know how active allmagic.com is anymore. I've been trying to get them to list my Tabman Tables website for a year and with no reply to the five or six emails I've sent out. I've emailed Richard Robinson a few times to inquire with no reply to those either. Is he still active in the site??? I don't know. He's one of the early pioneers and at one time I wrote a "column" on his Spider Network called "Tabman's Magic Hollow" but if he's still around he must be laying low.

I've been hoping to get a read on what magicians think a great website should be. I want to "modernize" my Tabman Tables website from the hodgepodege it is now to something more cohesive and easier to view. Suggestions are most welcome.

All the best.

-=tabman

added with edit: Whilst I was over there at allmagic again just now I submitted Tabman Tables again for inclusion. Have any new sites been added lately??? I hope Robinson is ok??!?

Guest

Re: Top Magic Sites On The WWW

Postby Guest » January 18th, 2005, 4:47 pm

You could also try Andy Martin's web page of the top 100 voted sites

Guest

Re: Top Magic Sites On The WWW

Postby Guest » February 14th, 2005, 6:50 pm

I've recently come across a new magic site that seems to have quite a bit of selections. Magic of a Rose. www.magicofarose.com Does anyone know anything about it?

Guest

Re: Top Magic Sites On The WWW

Postby Guest » March 17th, 2005, 7:49 pm

Hello Tabman,

For marketing research purposes there are twenty-three sites I use on the Internet to get a feel for the market.

Of those, two are considered "slum" magic, two are "top drawer" magic, two are considered "rip-off artists", one is strickly an auction site, and sixteen are considered functional magic retailers.

My research list is not available to the world at large, but ply me with doughnuts and I get careless. See you in Nashville in April.

Bob Sanders
Magic By Sander
The Amazed Wiz

Hershey Magic
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Re: Top Magic Sites On The WWW

Postby Hershey Magic » May 1st, 2005, 9:13 pm

For what it's worth, Hershey Magic (our site) gets a lot of traffic. We have a website and an actual store location in Harrisburg, PA at the Colonial park mall :)
http://www.hersheymagic.com

Thanks,
Keith

Guest

Re: Top Magic Sites On The WWW

Postby Guest » May 1st, 2005, 9:54 pm

Keith,

Did you know that allmagicguide.com will list you in their top 100 sites if your hits rank you there?

Bob Sanders
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Re: Top Magic Sites On The WWW

Postby Hershey Magic » May 27th, 2005, 9:11 am

Originally posted by Sander:
Keith,

Did you know that allmagicguide.com will list you in their top 100 sites if your hits rank you there?

Bob Sanders
Magic By Sander
How does that happen? We get about 2,500unique hits a week. I'd be interested in more info on this if you have it!

Thanks,
Keith

CHRIS
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Re: Top Magic Sites On The WWW

Postby CHRIS » May 27th, 2005, 1:26 pm

One way to measure the popularity of a site is to use the Alexa ranking (see www.alexa.com). Alexa measures actual site visits and ranks accordingly. For example, Yahoo is #1 and Google is #3.

Here is a ranking of some magic related sites:
(When I don't write any comment next to a shop it means that I have not bought through that site.)

18,080 Penguin Magic
64,486 The Magic Cafe
126,084 Magic Tricks
149,824 Ronjo
234,232 The Magic Warehouse
250,029 Elmwood Magic
255,796 Hocus Pocus
376,399 Genii Magazine
391,842 Meir Yedid Magic
567,428 L&L publishing
569,519 Stevens Magic Emporium (I have shoped there)
651,141 Hank Lee's (this guy is in Boston, I need to check it out)
699,248 Lybrary.com (the best for ebooks)
789,710 Earth's largest Magic Shop (for me the best magic shop online. David Malek is guy you can trust. No bull [censored] from him.)
931,135 Magic Magazine (not a bad magazine but way behind in Alexa ranking)
1,001,771 IBM
1,141,700 Houdini's Magic Shop
1,521,547 H&R magic shop (the best for books)
2,090,490 SAM
2,400,494 Hermetic Press (publishes the best magic books)
3,024,493 KTMagic

Certainly this is not exhaustive, but gives you a numerical ranking that actually has some relevance and meaning.

Chris
Lybrary.com preserving magic one book at a time.

Guest

Re: Top Magic Sites On The WWW

Postby Guest » May 27th, 2005, 1:56 pm

Originally posted by Chris Wasshuber:
One way to measure the popularity of a site is to use the Alexa ranking (see www.alexa.com). Alexa measures actual site visits and ranks accordingly. For example, Yahoo is #1 and Google is #3.

Here is a ranking of some magic related sites:
(When I don't write any comment next to a shop it means that I have not bought through that site.)

18,080 Penguin Magic
64,486 The Magic Cafe
126,084 Magic Tricks
149,824 Ronjo
234,232 The Magic Warehouse
250,029 Elmwood Magic
255,796 Hocus Pocus
376,399 Genii Magazine
391,842 Meir Yedid Magic
567,428 L&L publishing
569,519 Stevens Magic Emporium (I have shoped there)
651,141 Hank Lee's (this guy is in Boston, I need to check it out)
699,248 Lybrary.com (the best for ebooks)
789,710 Earth's largest Magic Shop (for me the best magic shop online. David Malek is guy you can trust. No bull [censored] from him.)
931,135 Magic Magazine (not a bad magazine but way behind in Alexa ranking)
1,001,771 IBM
1,141,700 Houdini's Magic Shop
1,521,547 H&R magic shop (the best for books)
2,090,490 SAM
2,400,494 Hermetic Press (publishes the best magic books)
3,024,493 KTMagic

Certainly this is not exhaustive, but gives you a numerical ranking that actually has some relevance and meaning.

Chris
Lybrary.com preserving magic one book at a time.
Chris,

the Alexa rankings are well known to be very out of whack. I used to use the Alexa toolbar and I frequently found myself in the top 20,000 sites for http://martinsmagic.com - and when I stopped using the toolbar I dropped down millions. Even though the actual traffic on my site kept going up.

The Alexa rankings are very much biased to people who use the Alexa toolbar, and it is very easy to get yourself up the charts if you use one every day for your site. They have a small userbase and are subject to huge fluctuations.

So I would not read too much into the relevance and meaning of these results. If you want to see yourself shoot up the Alexa Rankings, install the toolbar, add a review or two of your site and just use the toolbar each day and you will see yourself shoot up. Even though the actual traffic to your site doesn't change at all!

If you search on Google for Alexa Rankings you will find many discussions about the weakness of their results.

Just fyi.

andy

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Re: Top Magic Sites On The WWW

Postby CHRIS » May 27th, 2005, 2:09 pm

Andy,

you are correct, the Alexa numbers are not the end all be all in site ranking, and I didn't mean to suggest they are the ultimate ranking, but they are better than nothing and in my experience have meaning. The further down you are in the ranking the easier it is to manipulate - naturally. On the other hand Yahoo and Google are not #1 and #3 because their employees have the toolbar installed. They are ranking so high because many people visit these sites.

If more magicians would install the Alexa toolbar, then the accuracy of the relative rating between magic sites would improve.

In any case, I wanted to share another view at how to rank sites.

Chris
Lybrary.com preserving magic one book at a time.

Guest

Re: Top Magic Sites On The WWW

Postby Guest » May 27th, 2005, 2:47 pm

Are those numbers the hits those sites get? I've never heard of KTMagic before. I do have to agree with you about elmagicshop.com though.
Steve V

CHRIS
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Re: Top Magic Sites On The WWW

Postby CHRIS » May 27th, 2005, 2:52 pm

Steve,

the Alexa number is a ranking. Meaning, the higher the number the less popular the site.

Chris

Guest

Re: Top Magic Sites On The WWW

Postby Guest » May 27th, 2005, 2:56 pm

Chris,

People visiting magic sites are so small compared to mainstream sites like yahoo and google the numbers are just too out of whack.

For example, I have intimate knowledge of the real traffic on 8 magic sites - ElmwoodMagic.com is on your list above. TheTrickery.com actually gets almost twice the number of vistors that Elmwood gets each month, and yet the 1 week ranking average for TheTrickery shows on alexa as 746,324 and elmwood is at 150,791. Even the 3 month is 282,408 vs 250,029. And today is 56,334 for heaven's sake!

Of course if all the magicians who were online had Alexa these numbers would be more accurate - given that that is not the case, and is unlikely to be the case - all these numbers do is give a false impression.

Of the sites that I have actual data for the list goes like this:

1 http://www.thetrickery.com
2 http://www.elmwoodmagic.com
3 http://www.vikingmagic.com
4 http://www.martinsmagic.com
5 http://www.qualitymagicbooks.com
6 http://www.qualitymagic.com
7 http://www.thecentertear.com - (new)
8 http://warner.qualitymagic.com

It is even hard to compare sites from different providers as everyone has their own ways of calcuating visitors.

I used to really think Alexa was cool until I realised how easy it was to mess with the numbers - even without knowing it.

So I never use it anymore.

The Top 100 on my site uses real data from people voting once - but of course it is biased because the people are on my site so naturually often vote for the sites I've produced. The Top 100 on AllMagic is basically people who advertise with Richard. The lists all have their biases.

The best thing to do is find a site you like and then find other sites from the same company or dealer, or magician, or links they recommend.

I, naturally, think Digital Cheetah produce some of the best magic websites on the web. The single most successful sales vehicle is AllMagic.com - this drives way more sales for all of my clients than anything else. Not always as much traffic, but always more sales. The MagicCafe generates a ton of traffic, but for my clients at least very few sales. Howie at the Trickery has some Blaine Sites that generate him more traffic than all other sites put together. ElmwoodMagic is getting a lot of traffic from a porn site in Taiwan ...

I guess it just depends what you are looking for!

Of course the other problem with all of this is the criteria for "Top Magic Site". I think the best place to buy magic ebooks is lybrary.com by far, but I think your actual site leaves something to be desired from a design and usability perspective. I think martinsmagic.com is one of the best sites to view photos of new and old magic tricks and read reviews but you can't buy any tricks from there so how annoying is that!

The biggest reason I put the Top100 on my site ( http://www.martinsmagic.com/?html=top100 ) was so that I could see any cool new sites that came along. And when I found them I'd post them too - so at least I had one place to store all the good sites. Of course, because anyone can post on there, not all the sites on the list are to my taste - I try to weed out the really bad ones every now and then.

Well before I get into trouble, that is enough of my rantings!

andy

CHRIS
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Re: Top Magic Sites On The WWW

Postby CHRIS » May 27th, 2005, 4:55 pm

Andy, everything you write makes sense. Any ranking can ultimately be questioned and it is up to the users to interpret any ranking accordingly.

On the other hand I am not ready to disregard Alexa rankings completely, because they have made sense for the sites I have data for. Even if your individual traffic stays the same or goes up, it doesn't mean your ranking should get better, because there can be new sites or other sites whoes traffic increased even more. So unless you know the traffic of all sites you couldn't really prove or disprove Alexa numbers.

For me Alexa is somewhat like the TV Nielsen ratings. They aren't awfully accurate, but over time and viewed in the aggregate there is value and meaning. Of course, it doesn't necessarily mean a site with a lot of traffic has to be a good site. It is just one indicator among several others.

Chris
Lybrary.com preserving magic one book at a time.

Guest

Re: Top Magic Sites On The WWW

Postby Guest » May 27th, 2005, 5:24 pm

Originally posted by Chris Wasshuber:
Even if your individual traffic stays the same or goes up, it doesn't mean your ranking should get better, because there can be new sites or other sites whoes traffic increased even more. So unless you know the traffic of all sites you couldn't really prove or disprove Alexa numbers.

For me Alexa is somewhat like the TV Nielsen ratings. They aren't awfully accurate, but over time and viewed in the aggregate there is value and meaning. Of course, it doesn't necessarily mean a site with a lot of traffic has to be a good site. It is just one indicator among several others.
Chris,

My point is that I have 100% knowledge of two sites mentioned, and one has twice as much traffic, and yet Alexa ranks it hundreds of thousands of sites lower or the nearly the same. This should never be the case.

And if you think of Alexa as the Neilsen raitings I think you give it way more clout than it deserves. The biggest problem is that for small sites like magic sites, it is just way too easy to manipulate the numbers. And if people start believing the numbers then they only go to the highest ranked sites which just has litte or no meaning because they have been manipulated.

That is really my issue with Alexa - too easy to manipulate.

andy


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