Are Posterous Fudging Visitor Statistics? • Hacker News Board

Re: Are Posterous Fudging Visitor Statistics?

#31

Post by kingsidharth » Sun, Dec 12, 2010, 2:36 PM UTC

rantfoil wrote: post #27

ig1 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you not think the page view stats are completely misleading your users ? There's absolutely no indication on Posterous that bots are likely responsible for thousands of the page views shown (which given the long tail nature of Posterous I imagine we're talking about the majority of the page views here for a lot of users). One user even reported that GA was showing 14 visitors while Posterous was showing 9316: http…

A few weeks ago we had some bugs in new batch processing code that caused some major errors there. These bugs have since been fixed. We are definitely not as far off as 9316 vs 14 in normal operation. These numbers are far from meaningless. At the end of the day the numbers reflect what our servers see -- they track something different from Google Analytics but they are useful as a simple ballpark for how interesting…

Real time or not. Misleading numbers are misleading. Being real-time is no 'cover-up' for a misleading data.As far as 'simple ballpark for how interesting or visited your blog post' is concerned. If a bit visited me a 1000 time and just 100 people read it, that doesn't make it interesting. Reporting bots is seriously no use.

Re: Are Posterous Fudging Visitor Statistics?

#32

Post by ig1 » Sun, Dec 12, 2010, 2:41 PM UTC

rantfoil wrote: post #27

ig1 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you not think the page view stats are completely misleading your users ? There's absolutely no indication on Posterous that bots are likely responsible for thousands of the page views shown (which given the long tail nature of Posterous I imagine we're talking about the majority of the page views here for a lot of users). One user even reported that GA was showing 14 visitors while Posterous was showing 9316: http…

A few weeks ago we had some bugs in new batch processing code that caused some major errors there. These bugs have since been fixed. We are definitely not as far off as 9316 vs 14 in normal operation. These numbers are far from meaningless. At the end of the day the numbers reflect what our servers see -- they track something different from Google Analytics but they are useful as a simple ballpark for how interesting…

You're avoiding the question about misleading your users.

If the majority of page views are generates by bots then the number of page views you show isn't even a ballpark figure indicating how interesting/visited the blog post is. It's simply a semi-random number depending on crawlers/bot activity and nothing to do with real human visitors.

If you were simply off by 10% I could accept your answer, but you seem to be regularly off by a factor 200-300%.

Re: Are Posterous Fudging Visitor Statistics?

#33

Post by ig1 » Sun, Dec 12, 2010, 2:54 PM UTC

patio11 wrote: post #23

epe wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn't simply excluding any http request whose user agent contains "googlebot" from the displayed count make it dramatically more accurate without needing a switch to JS-based analytics?

Trust me on this: no. I used to have ABingo ignore hits from several common bots. I then got around to implementing JS challenges. Participants in A/B tests prior to login immediately decreased by 75%, to about what my GA stats showed. P.S. As long as we're here: request.user_agent =~ /\b(HttpClient|Baidu|Gigabot|Googlebot|libwww-perl|lwp-trivial|msnbot|SiteUptime|Slurp|WordPress|ZIBB|ZyBorg)\b/i That, theoretically…

The key factor is that for a lot of bloggers audience is the reason they blog. Audience is the ROI of the time spent blogging. Someone who thinks they've got thousands of visitors may spend more time blogging rather than spending it with their families or working (which they would have done if they only had 10 readers)

It's even worse if you're using it for a company blog (like many startups are doing). Because your blog page view stats can often become part of investor pitches or sales material to show traction. If you write an advert and say 10,000 people read your blog when they don't and that influences your customers buying decision, you can be prosecuted for misleading your customers.

Re: Are Posterous Fudging Visitor Statistics?

#34

Post by ig1 » Sun, Dec 12, 2010, 3:24 PM UTC

ig1 wrote: post #32

rantfoil wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A few weeks ago we had some bugs in new batch processing code that caused some major errors there. These bugs have since been fixed. We are definitely not as far off as 9316 vs 14 in normal operation. These numbers are far from meaningless. At the end of the day the numbers reflect what our servers see -- they track something different from Google Analytics but they are useful as a simple ballpark for how interesting…

You're avoiding the question about misleading your users. If the majority of page views are generates by bots then the number of page views you show isn't even a ballpark figure indicating how interesting/visited the blog post is. It's simply a semi-random number depending on crawlers/bot activity and nothing to do with real human visitors. If you were simply off by 10% I could accept your answer, but you seem to be…

Just in case there was any doubt about Posterous not filtering out bots given that Garry hasn't specifically admitted it:

http://twitter.com/#!/richiepear/status/13809170130149376

  Rich Pearson (VP Marketing - Posterous)
  @imranghory No - we just don't filter out your own views 
  and search engine visits

Re: Are Posterous Fudging Visitor Statistics?

#35

Post by bodhi » Mon, Dec 13, 2010, 3:07 AM UTC

ewjordan wrote: post #16

icey wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a cultural difference. In the US, people refer to the named entity (is). In the UK, they refer to the collection of people that make up the entity (are).

Interesting, good to know. How do UK speakers deal with non-named entities? For example: My family is/are going out to the movie. The class was/were getting restless. These are common gotchas on the SAT in the US; one of their favorite tricks is using plural country names, like "The United States of America (is/are) ...", where in US English "is" is the correct version. Cheap trick that really only tests whether you'…

> My family is/are going out to the movie. The class was/were getting restless.

In Australian English (derived from but not identical to the UK):

My family is going to the movie. The class was getting restless.

And the programmer's favourite: The data is corrupt.

Re: Are Posterous Fudging Visitor Statistics?

#36

Post by bodhi » Mon, Dec 13, 2010, 3:40 AM UTC

bodhi wrote: post #35

ewjordan wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting, good to know. How do UK speakers deal with non-named entities? For example: My family is/are going out to the movie. The class was/were getting restless. These are common gotchas on the SAT in the US; one of their favorite tricks is using plural country names, like "The United States of America (is/are) ...", where in US English "is" is the correct version. Cheap trick that really only tests whether you'…

> My family is/are going out to the movie. The class was/were getting restless. In Australian English (derived from but not identical to the UK): My family is going to the movie. The class was getting restless. And the programmer's favourite: The data is corrupt.

Sorry to reply to myself, but I actually forgot to put my main point in, which was that British English generally refers to the group itself as the entity, whereas it seems that American English refers to the group elements individually.