Well, this is sure to be an interesting morning

This entry was posted on
Thursday, April 3rd, 2008
at
8:28 am and is filed
under The Political Weblog Movement.

For the best laugh you’ve had in ages, watch Dale and Staines lay into me with their usual bluster and bullshit, not knowing that they’d both dumped themselves in it last night.

Both Paul Staines and Iain Dale have been playing us for a fools for months. Possibly years.

They’ve been taking the figure for the number of visits to their site and regularly presenting this figure as the number of unique visitors, thereby giving the impression that they have 5 to 6 times the number of visitors than they actually do.

The reality is that they have a much smaller audience than most of us thought, and that audience clicks ‘refresh’ a lot (probably more so now than in the past, as Dale and Staines have had comment moderation on full-time for months now, and people do get impatient waiting for their comment about Gordon Brown’s rocking horse to appear).

In Iain Dale’s case, he’s claiming 250,000 unique visitors a month, when in reality it’s closer to 50,000

In Paul Staines’ case, he’s claiming 350,000 unique visitors a month, when in reality it’s closer to 75,000

If you’re having difficulty with the terms/concept, imagine me popping by your site and either visiting 5 different pages or refreshing a single page 5 times. You and I would say that I am 1 person; Dale and Staines would say I am 5 different people.

Alternatively, imagine what the singles chart would suddenly look like if a couple of mediocre artists started claiming that the number of times a track was played was in fact the number of times it had been purchased/downloaded. Picture them getting those juicy MSM interviews and mentions that go with being a perceived success and actually selling a few tracks off the back of that as they declare themselves the kings/queens of pop… and you’ll begin to understand just how pathetic this whole sham is, and how this revelation makes the audience they have gained looked even more insigificant.

I can’t wait to see what they pull out of the hat to explain or try to divert attention away from it. They certainly can’t admit to fudging their figures, as this would totally undermine MessageSpace’s claim that; “Publishers on the MessageSpace network show 4 million adverts a month, to more than 700,000 unique readers.”

UPDATE – Westmonster – You say visit, I say visitor: Now, we’ve been in many meetings over the years with clever people in suits whose eyes glaze over at statistical definitions, but suffice to say: Dale is completely wrong, and Ireland is completely right.








About Tim Ireland

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