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The site formerly known as Alexaholic has proceeded from being lauded by Alexa's owner, Amazon.com, to being the object of Amazon's unpleasant, lawyerly advances. The data offered by the Alexa website has been a fixture in search marketing for years. That focus and the IE toolbar requirement for Alexa may skew data for sites, but Alexa's longer existence and available information has made it very popular, particularly with a hardcore stats-oriented audience.

Ron Hornbaker, creator of Statsaholic, fits in with that group. His side project isn't viewed by Alexa or Amazon as a welcome extension of Alexa's information any longer, as TechCrunch noted today.

Hornbaker blogged about his saga, from the original construction of the site during a long February weekend last year, to his current battles with the site:

About two months after launch, I got a voicemail from Geoffrey Mack, Product Manager at Alexa, requesting that I call him back....The conversation was, on the whole, encouraging and flattering — Alexa liked what I had built, and was giving their tacit approval to Alexaholic. Shortly thereafter, Geoff complimented the Alexaholic interface on Alexa’s corporate blog.

In early March of this year, Alexa filed a UDRP complaint with ICANN to try to take the alexaholic.com domain away from me because it has their brand name, “alexa”, embedded within. In response, I changed the name of Alexaholic to Statsaholic, which better fits my plan to add data from other providers, anyway.

I discovered last week that my problems were only starting — Alexa started blocking their graphs from appearing on the Statsaholic website by sniffing the referrer header as the requests hit their servers. Keep in mind that tens of thousands of other websites hotlink to Alexa traffic graphs, and that Alexa could shut them all off in one fell swoop if they really wanted to.

Hornbaker is no leech; he's paying Alexa several hundred dollars a month for their data. "Why hasn’t Alexa made the graphs part of their official API and charged per request?" he asked. "They’ve done it with their website thumbnail images, and with data, but why not with the graphs?"

If Alexa is calling a paying customer a "pirate," as Hornbaker contends their people now do to him, someone might want to stop by the Amazon website and pick up a dictionary for Alexa CEO Bruce Gilliat. We doubt co-founder and former Alexa CEO Brewster Kahle would have let this mess get out of hand this way.

Got a tip that's too hot for the comments section? Email me, dutter at webpronews dot com.