|
+
Ze Errors
After some discrepancy, Ze Frank has laid into me because he doesn't believe how he could only have a fraction of the audience size of Rocketboom.
I was pretty surprised because we have had some friendly emails recently and he has asked me about my stats but apparently didn't believe me. I have even offered to have him come by and have a look but he would rather just assume I must be wrong I guess.
It turns out Ze receives about 30,000 downloads per day compared to Rocketboom which receives well over 300,000 per day.
As a result of Ze's outspoken concerns, I got a call today from Marshall Kirkpatrick from Techcrunch who wanted to go over all of my stats. He was pretty skeptical at first but I gave him logins for the various servers and spent an hour on the phone going over everything.
He confirmed my numbers. This is not a first, and you don't need to take it from him.
I have always been open about this and Rocketboom is in a very, very different position than Ze Frank.
Ze has been doing online video for a very long time, but he uses 1.0 means of distributing his show (e.g. no links out of his site, no off-site distributions or redistribution partners) and he only started to identify with "videoblogging" once videoblogging defined him. In otherwords, Ze is brilliantly interactive with his not-safe-for-work-or-school audience, but has not done much, relitively speaking, in pioneering the space that we are both defined by now and he has not been much of a contributor to lifting up others in terms of sharing his ideas for how to make all of this work.
I always thought he should do a short-form daily show and told him as much a year before he finally did. During the year that he didn't, he missed quite a bit.
Overtime, Rocketboom has become very pervasive internationally, especially as a reference point to which other things are often compared and tried.
Just looking at my stats today, I noticed we have over 15,000 phone distributions of each episode alone. That's half Ze's total daily audience on the phone. Lets not get into TiVo which accounts for more than the other half, our daily Japanese version, TVTonic type aggregators, home made aggregators, my goodness, my rant -> .mov files, .wmv, full_.wmv .3gp, .3gpp, .mp4, .mpg _hd.mov just for each episode to accommodate everyone.
While this sounds spread out, in short, statistics can be known very easily and clearly - there is no mixup or problem with understanding video stats:
The core of the matter is not hits or page views or uniques or subscribers or Alexa #'s it's how many completed videos were served. The video carries the ad. So that is what the advertiser wants to know, that is the ultimate value number and that is what Mr. Frank stated he was most concerned about: ad revenue potential. For any website that uses Apache and keeps a log file (i.e. the majority of the websites on the internet), this is a no brainer to see. Again, its simply a video file and fIles are easily counted.
I'm with Brogan, this is no time to compete.
I'd say don't worry about it so much, just do your thing; if you have a creative voice like Ze does, 30,000 is a huge amount of people to be watching daily, more will come in due time.
***update: Even Alexa is in on the game and posted a graph on their front page. Dear frenzy, Ze Frank has a big website with a lot of stuff going on and has been doing it for years. He said he gets 30,000 views of his show. How many page views does he get? A lot more which is likely fueling his Alexa status. Rocketboom delivers more videos than page views. Look now at how our Alexa stats have gone up today. It's just an indication of ONE KIND of audience out of the many kinds of audiences out there. Google trends is another story too. Boingboing has 3-million people per day reading, it's all relative.
***update2: Heather Green orchestrated another run of the stats along with Rob from Podcast411 and we now have what I would call the most accurate count yet. For the first two weeks of October on average 211,000 d/l per day. There are still more off site distributions but's not worth discussing. Marshall Kirkpatrick just posted as well.
Posted to rocketboom by Rocketboom on
October 24, 2006
6:39 PM
Comments:
+ Joseph Hunkins
Nice post. I wish everybody would be as open with stats as you clearly are. Even with full transparency it's hard to figure out the BS from the reality, so we all should keep metrics as transparent as possible and encourage resolution of disputes as you've tried to do in this case.
Posted: October 25, 2006 3:33 PM
+ rick rey
Well done. Ze pushed it a little too hard. What's baffling to me is how much he (and others) underestimate the power of multiple distribution channels.
Posted: October 26, 2006 5:19 PM
+ Hal O'Brien
It's possible I'm misunderstanding Ze's point, but I think it's very different than what you're responding to.
What I hear Ze saying is, there's no way to independently verify any of these measuring services. That means we have no idea what the numbers really mean.
So, yeah, you can have a journalist come in and "verify" that what you're claiming is what the various measuring services are telling you... But that leaves wholly unanswered the question of, How do we know the measuring services are getting it right in the first place?
In other words, the conversation has been something like this:
"I'm getting ten squillion zorks of hits a day!"
"That's nice, but what does that mean?"
"How dare you question my honesty! Look! Right here on the Alexa/Technorati/Techcrunch/Nielsen homepage! I'm getting ten squillion zorks of hits a day!"
"Yes, but what does that mean? Why does that matter? Who gives a damn?"
Rinse. Lather. Repeat.
Posted: October 26, 2006 5:27 PM
+ Hal O'Brien
Another way to look at this:
Remember when Jon Stewart went onto CNN, and Bergala and Carlson tried to rip into him for being an irresponsible satirist of politics? And Stewart tried (albeit obliquely) to explain that, No, he doesn't satirize politics, he satirizes the press. And neither of them could get that, because (like many in the press) they take themselves too seriously to believe anybody could even want to make fun of them.
OK. I see Ze here doing something very similar. He isn't making fun of your numbers. He's making fun of the fact you seem to think the numbers matter. And your whole response here makes the basic assumption that, Of course the numbers matter!
Which, unfortunately, only makes you look like even more of a rube. {shrug}
Posted: October 26, 2006 5:44 PM
+ rick rey
Hal - the stats referenced here are verifiable. They are server logs. And the numbers matter when it comes to advertising dollars.
Posted: October 26, 2006 7:14 PM
+ Hal O'Brien
Rick -- I guess I've worked on too many servers. I don't regard server logs as "verifiable." :) Certainly I don't regard them as verifiable by third parties.
As to advertising... That only backs the question up one level. That is, if someone's silly enough to spend money on advertising, well, fine, it's a free country (so far). But there is no objective correlation between advertising and sales, which is what advertising purports to provide and/or sell. Given that, I see it as little better than fraud -- certainly from a shareholder's point of view.
So if Drew is able to justify higher advertising rates on the basis of these numbers, mazeltov. But let's not pretend they have any objective connection to reality, either on the part of seller or the buyer.
Insisting otherwise is, again, the mark of a rube. ("I have a right to be defrauded!")
Posted: October 26, 2006 8:00 PM
+ Nab
Drew, I think part of the problem is that you are usually pretty vague about the numbers, at least to the general public. Ze mentioned a graph from you that showed bars and colors but no actual numbers. And even in this post you are somewhat hand wavy, like you're glossing over. I'm pretty sure there are a lot of people who agree with Ze about this but are too "nice" to ever admit it to you.
So look, Ze was sort of a jerk, but maybe there's a lesson here for you. When you talk about numbers, people feel like you're bragging a bit, and then they wonder if you're exaggerating. So maybe you should either get very humble and stop mentioning your numbers. Or better, you could publish how exactly the numbers break down for one day. I mean a table with three columns: Kind of service (ie Tivo), File type (ie .mov), and number of completed video downloads.
That would shut everybody up.
Posted: October 26, 2006 11:35 PM
+ huindekmi
It's not how many completed videos were served, it's how many completed videos were *WATCHED*. If you can't prove viewership, you can't justify ad revenues.
This is something that is difficult to impossible to accurately measure. It's also something that your statistics overinflate. 300,000 headless downloads != 300,000 viewers.
Posted: October 27, 2006 1:12 PM
+ Jon
It would only be a fair comparison if Ze was female and as hot as joanne. Otherwise the stats ain't fair, it's just Web [reptilian] the first web, before we put numbers after it and all.
Posted: October 27, 2006 1:17 PM
+ Nab
Well, I guess I was wrong. The posts above show publishing detailed numbers wouldn't shut everybody up. But I think it would convince most people.
Posted: October 28, 2006 12:30 AM
Post a comment:
¡
|
