August 6, 2010 – Of 14 websites with a Marina City connection, traffic is up at almost half over the past three months, according to the web analysis company Alexa.

skyscrapercity.com, operated by Marina City resident Jan Klerks, is not losing its top spot anytime soon. It is ranked as the 1,709th most popular site on the Internet, a 17 percent increase from May.

Traffic at hotelsaxchicago.com was up 43 percent over the past three months for an Alexa rank of 1,970,560.

bin36.com’s traffic was down 57 percent but it was still the third most popular site, with a ranking of 2,019,146.

marinacityonline.com appears to have recovered from an off Alexa quarter and came in fourth, up 29 percent to 2,925,638.

Architecture writer and west tower resident Lynn Becker rounded out the top five. Traffic to his blog was down 36 percent for a rank of 3,103,619.

The biggest increase in traffic, according to Alexa, was at the site of Vincent Falk, arguably Marina City’s most famous current resident. The riverfront fixture and documentary subject went from a ranking of more than 10.7 million in February to 7.9 million in May and then 3.6 million at the start of August.

(Left) A typical photo from vpfalk.net, the website of Marina City resident Vincent Falk.

On August 6, 2010, according to Alexa, the top websites related to Marina City were…

mymtca.com, marinacitychicagogiftshopgallery.com, and landmarkmarinacitynow.org did not have enough traffic to be ranked. chicagocarless.com lost its Marina City connection when its author, Mike Doyle, moved this year to the Lincoln Square neighborhood.

Alexa does not rank sub-domains, which would exclude sites such as Dick’s Last Resort and the Marina Watchdog blog.

Alexa bases traffic estimates on data collected from users of its toolbar and other sources over three months. There are an estimated 206 million websites on the Internet. The top three sites, according to Alexa, are currently google.com, facebook.com, and youtube.com.