{"id":42049,"date":"2018-12-28T09:05:01","date_gmt":"2018-12-28T14:05:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=42049"},"modified":"2018-12-28T09:05:01","modified_gmt":"2018-12-28T14:05:01","slug":"everything-is-fake-ex-reddit-ceo-confirms-internet-traffic-metrics-are-bullshit","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=42049","title":{"rendered":"“Everything Is Fake”: Ex-Reddit CEO Confirms Internet Traffic Metrics Are\u00a0Bullshit"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

“Everything Is Fake”: Ex-Reddit CEO Confirms Internet Traffic Metrics Are\u00a0Bullshit<\/span><\/a><\/h3>\n<\/div>\n
\n
\n
\n
\n

“It’s all true: Everything is fake,” tweeted Former Reddit CEO Ellen Pao regarding a\u00a0Wednesday New York Magazine<\/em><\/a>\u00a0article which reveals that internet traffic metrics from some of the largest tech companies are overstated or fabricated. In other words; they’re bullshit.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Pao was responding to a tweet by the\u00a0Washington Post<\/em>‘s Aram Zucker-Schariff, quoting the following segment of the article:<\/p>\n

\n

The metrics are fake.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Take something as seemingly simple as how we measure web traffic. Metrics should be the most real thing on the internet: They are countable, trackable, and verifiable, and their existence undergirds the advertising business that drives our biggest social and search platforms. Yet\u00a0not even Facebook<\/a>, the world\u2019s greatest data\u2013gathering organization, seems able to produce genuine figures. <\/strong>In October,\u00a0small advertisers filed suit against the social-media giant<\/a>, accusing it of covering up, for a year, its\u00a0significant overstatements<\/a>\u00a0of the time users spent watching videos on the platform<\/strong> (by 60 to 80\u202fpercent, Facebook says; by 150 to 900 percent, the plaintiffs say).\u00a0According to an exhaustive list at MarketingLand<\/a>, over the past two years Facebook has admitted to misreporting the reach of posts on Facebook Pages (in two different ways)<\/strong>, the rate at which viewers complete ad videos, the average time spent reading its \u201cInstant Articles,\u201d the amount of referral traffic from Facebook to external websites, the number of views that videos received via Facebook\u2019s mobile site, and the number of video views in Instant Articles.<\/p>\n

Can we still trust the metrics? <\/strong>After the Inversion, what\u2019s the point? Even when we put our faith in their accuracy, there\u2019s something not quite real about them: My favorite statistic this year was Facebook\u2019s claim that 75 million people watched at least a minute of Facebook Watch videos every day \u2014<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“Everything Is Fake”: Ex-Reddit CEO Confirms Internet Traffic Metrics Are\u00a0Bullshit “It’s all true: Everything is fake,” tweeted Former Reddit CEO Ellen Pao regarding a\u00a0Wednesday New York Magazine\u00a0article which reveals that internet traffic metrics from some of the largest tech companies are overstated or fabricated. In other words; they’re bullshit. Pao was responding to a tweet […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[23651,23650,23648,23649,2084,5228,4318],"class_list":["post-42049","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-liberty","tag-aram-zucker-schariff","tag-ellen-pao","tag-internet-traffic","tag-new-york-magazine","tag-statistics","tag-washington-post","tag-zerohedge"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42049","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=42049"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42049\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":42050,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42049\/revisions\/42050"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=42049"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=42049"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=42049"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}