Each website in the Medialister Marketplace shows a set of traffic and authority metrics. Use them to compare publishers before you buy a placement. This article tells you where each number comes from, when it changes, and how far you can trust it.
All traffic and authority numbers are estimates from third-party tools. They are good for comparing publishers with each other. They are not exact counts of visitors.
Three external providers supply the data.
Provider | What it gives us |
|---|---|
SimilarWeb | Monthly visits, time on site, pages per visit, traffic sources (direct, search, social, referral) and top countries |
Ahrefs | Domain Rating and organic traffic |
Semrush | Authority Score and organic traffic |
Each provider measures traffic in its own way. Because of this, Ahrefs and Semrush can show different organic traffic for the same site. Neither number is wrong, but compare like with like: Ahrefs with Ahrefs, Semrush with Semrush.
Medialister calculates three more proprietary metrics.
Metric | What it tells you |
|---|---|
MAI (Medialister Attention Index) | How long a typical article on the site stays in a reader's memory, in days |
Estimated Placement Views | How many people will probably see one placement on the site |
Trust Rank | The quality of the site's backlink profile, as one number |
Estimated Placement Views is the expected audience of one placement, not the monthly traffic of the whole site.
To learn more about MAI and how to use it in a campaign, read Medialister Attention Index (MAI).
On the offer page, some metrics have a colour. The colour shows if the value is weak, average or strong.
Metric | Weak (red) | Average (yellow) | Strong (green) |
|---|---|---|---|
Ahrefs Domain Rating | 0–39 | 40–69 | 70–100 |
Semrush Authority Score | 0–39 | 40–69 | 70–100 |
Organic traffic (Ahrefs or Semrush) | Less than 1,000 | 1,000–99,999 | 100,000 or more |
Trust Rank | Less than 0 | 0 to less than 0.8 | 0.8 or more |
The colours are a quick guide, not a verdict. A site in the yellow zone can still be the right choice when it reaches exactly the audience you need.
We collect metrics for the whole domain, not for separate pages. For example, example.com/news and example.com/business show the same numbers, because they are parts of the same site.
Subdomains are different sites for us. So example.com and blog.example.com can show different metrics, because their audiences are often different too.
All metrics update once a month, usually around the 20th.
When a publisher adds a new website, we get its SimilarWeb data immediately. Ahrefs and Semrush values can come later, with the next monthly update.
A metric shows N/A when we do not have a value we can trust. This happens when:
The provider has no data for the site. This is common for small or new sites.
The data is older than one year. We remove it instead of showing it as current.
An input for a calculated metric is missing or not valid. For example, MAI needs both time on site and pages per visit.
N/A does not mean that the site is bad. It only means that we do not have enough data to show a number.
Estimates are less accurate for small sites. When a site has only a few thousand visits a month, use its traffic numbers as a rough guide only.
No. Publishers cannot edit or override metrics. All values update automatically from the providers.