CoinMarketCap updates exchange ranking system to include Web traffic, Binance now ranks first

Crypto data aggregation site CoinMarketCap has unveiled a new change how it ranks exchanges, and now includes a metric of Web traffic as part of that calculation.

The change went live on Thursday after CMC announced the move in a May 13 blog post. "In most cases, with crypto being a retail-driven market, for an exchange to have high volumes, it needs to have a large number of retail traders (i.e. buyers and sellers). Instead of asking exchanges to submit their user numbers, a good intermediate proxy will be web traffic," the site's team wrote, adding:

"As such, we have designed the Web Traffic Factor in this iteration. It takes into account an extensive range of data points, including pageviews, unique visitor count, bounce rate, time-on-site, relative ranking and keyword searches on major search engines."

According to the exchange rankings page, Binance – which announced its acquisition of CoinMarketCap early last month – now ranks in first place. 

CoinMarketCap said in its blog post that the metric as it currently exists does not "provide the full picture" and that "[t]his metric is, as shared above, an intermediate step in this iterative process." And Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao said of the new ranking approach on Twitter: "This ranking is currently heavily biased towards web traffic, not 100% accurate, but better than before. Will continue to iterate."

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In the blog post, CoinMarketCap said that it plans to keep working on changes to its exchange scoring framework. In a FAQ section about a unified scoring metric, the site said: "That is the plan, to simplify our metrics for new users who want to get the information at a glance."

"We are working on the UX/UI designs to make it easier to filter and sort for the attributes that you care about — it will be rolled out throughout this iterative process," the post explained.

As The Block's Larry Cermak noted in his April by-the-numbers report, data from SimilarWeb indicates that Binance drew in an estimated 23.2 million visitors that month. This figure accounts for approximately 23 percent of the total share of Web traffic to surveyed exchanges. 

In the blog post, CoinMarketCap also detailed an update to its liquidity scoring system as well as a unified page for exchange rankings. 

"This is part of our ongoing effort to make our information more user-friendly and easy-to-navigate," the site said of the unified page.