UKNM: FW: E-lies and statistics

[Ani Tertzakian]

The great American writer H L Mencken said that the first thing any 

journalist should ask when confronted by a politician is: "Why is this

lying bastard lying to me?" Heaven knows what he would have made of

today's dotcom exec, laden with paper options worth millions, so long as

he has a smattering of "statistics" to support them.


E-lying is common among individuals who daily have to answer that

crucial 

question: exactly how popular is your website? They tend to resort to 

gobbledegook about the site scoring "hits" that often run into millions.


Does this mean they have millions of visitors? Not exactly...


A hit is simply a PC's request for an individual chunk of information on

a 

page. You can triple the number of hits just by adding the number of 

pictures each viewer must download to view the page.


Another tool of the trade is the notion of the "subscriber". If you have

at 

some stage visited a website and passed on your e-mail address, you are

now, 

in all probability, part of that company's share price. It scarcely

matters 

that their junk mails go straight into your bin. Net business relies on

the 

idea that a potential customer captured today will turn into hard cash 

tomorrow. In dotcom la-la land, a name, any name, on a subscriber

register 

is gold dust. Never mind that this is like Boots claiming as a customer 

everyone who walks past its doors and happens to stare at a window

display.


Even dafter than that, banks and stockbrokers who should know better are


playing this game too, converting mythical future sales into real,

concrete 

valuations of a company today. They ascribe a value to each name on

those 

digital miles of junk-mailing lists, add up the lot and try to flog the 

business to the markets on the basis of their calculations. Are they

mad? 

No, just greedy.


Any real analysis of website use starts with "page impression". Measured

by 

software on the website, this is the number of individual times a page

is 

viewed. How do you know the figures are true? Look at the way the

printed 

world works: most leading newspapers and magazines are audited by 

independent organisations that check the sales figures. If you want to

know 

the circulation of The Sunday Times, or any other national newspaper,

you 

turn to the Audit Bureau of Circulations (ABC) for their certified 

statistics.


ABC is now in the business of auditing websites too, and you can find

its 

electronic arm, ABCE, at www.abce.org.uk. This is not the easiest site

to 

navigate or read, but if you want hard facts about web "circulation" it

is 

the best hope anyone has at the moment. ABCE takes those page-impression


logs and verifies that they are accurate, or at least as accurate as 

possible. Even the organisation's managing director, Richard Foan,

admits 

the final figure may be slightly out, probably erring on the side of 

caution.


What is important is that the same software and methodology are applied

to 

each site. So if Yahoo! comes up with twice the audience as BBC Online,

then 

the proportions will be correct even if the actual numbers are still

hard to 

pin down. The audit points up the dramatic difference between hits and 

users: BBC Online News, for example, may claim 41m page impressions over

a 

two-month period, but we see that they have been achieved by about 2.4m 

users, which starts to put things in proportion.


The rub is that only 140 of Britain's commercial websites are currently 

willing to subject themselves to ABCE's audit. Are the rest happy to

wing it 

on a lie and a prayer?


In the print world, an unaudited newspaper or magazine circulation claim

is 

greeted with the scepticism it deserves. The same must surely apply to

the 

web. The technology exists to rate web viewing, but what is missing is 

willingness on the part of many web companies to be honest about the 

audience they are achieving and to open their statistics to outside 

scrutiny. Stricter definitions of those elusive terms "user" and 

"subscriber" are also needed to prevent any website that happens to have


acquired our e-mail address claiming us as a customer.


The web is overloaded with hype, which goes some way to explaining the 

predicament of dotcom companies on the stock markets. We need more facts

to 

support the bluster.



~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

 the UK's totally managed affiliate marketing solution.

 ukaffiliates.com >> the net.working

 http://www.ukaffiliates.com /

salesukaffiliates [dot] com (mailto:salesukaffiliates [dot] com)

 telephone: 020 7691 1880 / fax: 020 7691 1881

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

  To unsubscribe or change your list settings go to

http://www.chinwag.com/uk-netmarketing or

helpchinwag [dot] com