It's all a farce, anyway...
[photo by ScoobyMoo ...looove the name]
So...I was out last night with a group of Mac developers and started talking to a bright young guy who had started a blog just over a month ago. No big deal. Looks like lots of people are doing it.
The difference here was that this new blogger was already at the rank of around 4,000 on Technorati. Wow, I asked, what did happened there? It takes most unknowns at least a couple of months to get there...and that's with some major name behind them (like Guy Kawasaki). I had never heard of this bright young guy and he is, really, just starting to build a name for himself in the Mac developer world.
Well, he replied, I've had a couple of my posts dugg on DIGG quite a few times. It's easy to game the system, he told me smugly, I just ask all of my friends to digg me and once you get past a certain number of diggs, people just hit digg if they are remotely interested in the topic.
Do they even read the article? I ask, stupidly.
Almost everyone in the room looked at me as if to ask where have you been and answered, No. Not usually, they agreed.
Wow.
It may seem terribly off-putting at first, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized that what they are doing is amazingly subversive.
They are exposing how farcical numbers are online.
And here is the thing. I remember years ago, pitching to clients why it is so important to do their marketing online:
Everything is measurable! I exclaimed, It's the end of the marketing era without accountability!
I would quote, for effect, that famous Ogilvy quote, "50% of advertising works, we just don't know what 50" and poke fun and say, But numbers online don't lie, so go online.
Heh.
Well, here we are, Google facing all sorts of click fraud lawsuits, bright young punks gaming ranking systems, books being written on formulas to get better search ranking and promote your sales-driven website. People claiming to know the answers, and others hiring people to deliver the answers. A-list bloggers who link to other a-list bloggers who talk about how they read everyone but a-list bloggers. Ooooo, aaaaah...Subservient Chicken was viewed a gabillion times...there is an example of one helluva viral campaign.
And we are left with...um...what?
In the brilliant words of my esteemed colleague: Bullshit.
So, what do we know? What have we learnt? We just keep feeding the same damned system over and over. Numbers. Those numbers, they never lie, do they? They are scientific and logical and will tell us how successful or unsuccessful we are. Someone led us astray. Numbers do lie.
While typing this, Chris stood in front of me and bastardized a quote he couldn't quite recall by someone he couldn't quite remember that went something like:
Money is the root of all evil, because it inherently replaces value and there hasn't been a value assigned to human life. So money's very existence is in opposition to human worthAnd numbers work the same. People's eyes grow wide when I tell them that when at Riya, we had over 1 million photos uploaded on the first day. Wow...but as Munjal wrote, those numbers dropped drastically over the following weeks. Why? Numbers couldn't replace human worth. Connections. Community. Contact. There was no real reason for people to fall in love, spread it, tell their friends, etc. Today, Munjal is working hard to build those relationships by opening the lines of communication between Riya and the blogosphere. It will definitely pay off for them. These relationships will probably have to be built one at a time.
What is the value difference between 100,000 users and 1,000 active community members? What do the numbers really tell us? We can sit and watch rank and traffic and click-throughs and whatever other number, but it is nearly impossible to tell the difference between a web spider and a human being unless s/he speaks with you. And as we treat more and more people like numbers, we'll have less and less of that contact. We could luck out and watch our numbers steadily rise or watch them fall and wonder on both sides of the equation:
What do people really think of what we are doing?
Okay. So I've waxed poetic into a corner now and I'd like to hear more from you...my readers, which could be anywhere between 2 and 20,000/day - depending on the 'measurement' one uses ('cause they all seem to say something radically different).
19 Comments:
I was once told this ..
"reach is different than rank!
you have a wide reach on 1 Google blog I know :)"
this made me realize that even thou I had a very narrow readership and T'rati ranking.. I was still seeding infonuggets across a very very broad spectrum of community... !!
I completely agree that it's all a farce . . . and yet I use web metrics a lot.
For me their main purpose is to satisfy the powers that be that whatever I'm doing is generating enough "results" for them to feel good about letting me continue to do it.
In that sense, they're indispensible.
Good observations, and I really like Chis' take on money/value.
But the numbers don't lie -- what they mean changes as the people and processes that generate them change.
I'm one of the few who actually reads the article before digging it, no matter how many before me may have done so.
To me, one comment that says "what you wrote changed how I viewed this or helped me do something I wanted to do" is worth far more than a higher Technorati ranking.
Since most ordinary folks (meaning my mom, my aunt, my brother, my mother-in-law, etc. etc) are still wrapping themselves around blogs, they don't have a clue about what Technorati means to any of us anyway or why they should tag, or even what a tag is.
DnW
I write a blog. Ha surprise that I would like to know that people read it, so I try and use metrics. My posts are my perspective on life in an innovative organization. Until my perspective becomes news (i.e. I become Bill Gates or other name that carries weight with pure words), Digg will do me no good.
Digg and Slashdot rightly or wrongly promote news and gossip - new items that interest the masses. "Phil's perspective on the way his professional life runs compared with others", is not news. So without making up stuff, how does a kid with a few friends really manipulate the numbers? Maybe as he says, you get enough diggs, then you're dugg by the masses. Either way, its that gaming that gets you to a place where maybe 1% of those who dugg you actually read, and liked what they read. Its pushy promotion. And it might work and get you a little more reach. And that's a metric to say people are listening.
Marginally off-topic thought and not to put a downer on things - the value of a human life is measured too regularly (except maybe war). For example, a little co-op job I did while in college was business development for London Underground (the Tube). Way back when, business development meant the elasticity between the cost of fares to travel and the number of people traveling. This was London, and even me without an economics background could work out that you could charge a ton and still everyone would travel by tube.
But the human life bit? Oh yeah. I had to write the biggest spreadsheet of my life. Something about net present value and keeping out of date tube trains running, balanced against x number of passengers losing limbs from failed doors and y number losing their life cos of failed other things - all v. paying 700 million quid to replace them with new trains. And all based on the stats London Underground had having experienced the loss of life and limbs for years. Attribute 'y' carried a cost (2 mil pounds I think). Attribute 'x' was close on this. Or as a driving instructor once said to my high-school friends - "its cheaper to kill someone than maim them - just don't reverse to make sure - that's poor form".
So metrics matter, but not necessarily in ways we would like.
Sorry :(
Phil
Like the previous commenter said, the numbers don't lie, it's just that we infer a lot of meaning from them that doesn't always take into account behaviour.
As the masses come online the ratio of wankers (ask Ben or another brit) to reasonable human beings is likely to increase. I would say this is likely to silo the internet into trusted communities.
Some people view places like Digg and LinkedIn/OpenBC and even blogging as a game, rather than a tool. How many connections can I get, and is my network bigger than yours!
Of course, this could be because I have a very small network and none of my posts have been Dugg! *sniff*
All the more reason to ignore "numbers" and focus on "results"...(back to the great quote - "3 types of lies - lies, damned lies and statistics")
Also speaking of quotes...the 50% advertising wasted quote is not from Ogilvy...it's from John Wanamaker. And according to some recent research, it's not 50%...it's 37%. I posted about it last week...
http://shotgunconcepts.blogspot.com/2006/08/its-not-half.html
And here's the original post...
http://shotgunconcepts.blogspot.com/2006/07/wanamaker-finally-gets-it.html
"Lies, damned lies, and statistics!" -- Mark Twain
The revelation to you of how blogs can be pushed up towards the top of the numbers tree is interesting but not surprising.
"There are no absolutes."
"In this world nothing is certain but death and taxes." (And, I'm sure some would argue against that too.)
I think numbers are a guide, 1 is different than 1,000,000, no matter what. But any good statistician would want averages over a significant period of time.
The failure of social bookmarking sites is that they can be great at spiking traffic, but that traffic disappears pretty quick.
Recently I had a post on the front page of reddit. Over 3 days it generated around 3,500 unique visitors. My FeedBurner stats went from around 50 to 328. They're now down at around 70.
It's fun to get the spike, but in the long run not terribly value.
Using numbers/traffic for ROI means a couple things:
1. Is it sustainable (or has it been sustained for a good period of time)
2. Is it impacting our bottomline.
A business shouldn't care if they get 1,000 or 1,000,000 visitors. They have to care which one makes them more money. And in many cases it might be 1,000.
If you really believe that money is the root of all evil, then in my book, you believe that human endeavor is evil. Money is just a proxy for human endeavor, so we don't have to trade the blueberries I might grow for the clothes that you might weave. Money also allows us to create particle accelerators, chemotherapy, vaccines, air conditioning, the Internet, TabletPCs that are affordable, and other things in life that are not exactly easy to carry around and trade.
BUT, if you're knocking the people who are STEALING money (yes, stealing) by offering less value expecting to get more--like scam artists--then yes, their illegal/unethical PURSUIT of "money" is the root of their "evil."
Me, I think I'm a good guy and what I produce is good. So I like money. And I don't expect more than what I offer in return.
Numbers on the web are definitely illusionary.
I've butted heads with so many bean counters at internet companies who coveted the numbers and trusted them simply because they were.
Of course they can be meaningful and should be analysed and used as benchmarks, but for the most part they offer models, not facts.
Internet numbers are dead. Long live internet numbers.
Did you not realise that gaming the system is where it's at right now? Do you honestly believe (for instance) that techmeme is all about the technology and not Gabe (by and large) by pimping his mates? I can prove that by the way.
I'm surprised more people don't recognise this. It's something I've occasionally returned to over the last year. But of course those who have most to lose on this don't want to talk about it.
I love what you wrote just there.
What's fascinating is that life on the internet seems to mirror life in general: there are A-list bloggers who link to other A-list bloggers in the same way that there are A-list clubs that only cater to the A-list crowd :-)
Very important to remember, I suppose, why one blogs in the first place.
For those that don't care about ranking or being read by a million random strangers - ranking and numbers shouldn't really matter.
If a blog is supposed to market, I guess then it does matter how many are reading it - but it also matters WHO :-)
Then there's always the wild card. The people who browse and click not really based on numbers. Life me, for instance.
It was through serendipity that I clicked on your site. I saw the title "HorsePigCow" and was intrigued :) I was actually searching for something else related to work, but was sufficiently intrigued I clicked on the link... :)
I had no intention of stopping by so long, but your article intrigued me further... hence I'm here, and writing you a note... because something about your post connected with me, and I'm writing based on that shared connection over a thought :)
I love your blog - cheers & keep it up :)
Well, just so you know, I read your blog and learn a lot by reading it. It is one of my favorites. Thanks for all the hard work you do. You have a community of readers, and that is worth something too.
If the "diggers" don't read his posts, then there's a fair chance that most of his "audience" doesn't read his blog. I may be wrong but it seems like just another geek showing off his cleverness to no great effect.
Just posting this comment to make sure that I am not Number/crawler.
I am a live person constantly sampling, weighing, dismissing, absorbing, contemplating, LOLing as ye write.
Anything taken too seriously also causes angst.
I know I read your site every day and enjoy it.
I am a new blogger and am so pissed off with it already.
I wish I had never been shown how to check my stats.
I post every day and recently asked a blogger friend how would I get more hits
"mention A list bloggers in your posts" was the answer
Building an audience becomes some sort of an obsession for every new blogger... it's true. But I would never settle for volume such as total number of visits or page views. I care about the ratio between short-lived visits (<10 sec) and the rest: typically ~ 30%. I care about a healthy balance between new readers (my marketing efforts are working) and returning visitors (content is still relevant). I pay close attention to the ratio of new visitors finding my site through various keywords, because that gives me a hint on what they need.
Tara,
Where do we all sign up for your fan club? You freaking Nailed it on the head. I know I am late to the game on commenting to this post but you are so right on.
Bloggers write like billboards when they try to capture everybodies attention but they are missing just handing flyers outside of a specialized oragami store.
It is not about the #s it is about the results. Tim grahl who runs a bike site. said it best on a post:
"you beat me on traffic but i beat you on profit"
end of story.
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