DSA Online | New Media Updates

A rather dubious report has been circling the internet today, and since it’s been picked up by several large news providers, I thought it merited commenting on.

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2011/06/are-people-using-facebook-less-growth-slowing-u-s-canada.html

http://news.yahoo.com/s/digitaltrends/20110613/tc_digitaltrends/facebooktrafficplummetsintheus

Facebook is not failing in Canada, despite what these misleading stats would have you believe.

The articles use stats without enough context and leave out key information to sensationalize a story. Aside from general seasonal fluctuations that have been commented on by others already, the numbers they are using are misleading or flat out wrong.

The numbers being quoted are from Facebook’s self-serve advertising interface, and represent total active users within the last 30 days; it is not a accurate list of membership. These numbers are estimate at best, as when you apply targeting parameters such as geographic areas, the reach in a given area will often exceed the actual population. This number represents all active profiles, included multiple profiles, and doesn’t differentiate between inactive users and deleted profiles.

In Canada, ComScore is the primary measurement tool for measuring online activity and it has reported growth in Facebook’s reach in Canada every single month since May 2009 (as far back as I have info on file). Their numbers actually exceed Facebook’s profile count, as they estimated a reach of 21.1 million users in May (84% of the estimated online population). The extra traffic would be non-registered users that still end up viewing Facebook pages (fan pages, pictures linked from other sites etc.)

The most glaring problem I have with this article is that  they are using a slow down in new user growth as an indicator that the site is losing steam. As mentioned, Facebook already reaches 84% of Canadians, growth has to slow as a market reaches total saturation. Countries with high penetration simply don’t have any population left to add to the numbers. Look at Reddit.com in comparison: in Canada the estimate reach of Reddit increased by over 450% since March 2010 (noting that the traffic does swing wildly month to month), in the same period Facebook grew by only about 4%. Yet Facebook’s actual number increase was 937,000, compared to reddit’s increase of 345,000. Yes, Facebook’s percentage growth is small, but the actual increase in traffic is huge.

There are also glaring omissions from the source article when reported by newspapers:

“Bugs in the Facebook advertising tool that we draw this information from, seasonal changes like college graduations, and other short-term factors, can influence numbers month to month and obscure what’s really happening.”

…and this bit, covered by the LA Times, but ignored by Yahoo:

“Still, by the time Facebook reaches around 50% of the total population in a given country (plus or minus, depending on internet access rates in that country), growth generally slows to a halt, as we’ve noted before.”

That million user drop in Canada?

“Canada also fell significantly, by 1.52 million down to 16.6 million, although it has been fluctuating around that number for the past year.”

Facebook is an easy target and has generated a lot of backlash on privacy and security issues in the past; news sources know it makes a great headline. However, these articles are entirely based on a single report based on numbers generated by a self-serve advertising platform that is known to be a broad estimate at best. The source article admits these numbers are prone to fluctuation and even opens their article with the following quote, omitted by the newspapers:

“As we note below, we’ll need to wait to see what the long-term trends really are before knowing if Facebook is continuing to grow in the US and other countries.”

That omission speaks volumes about the quality of this content.

As a parting item, the poster of the original report has a follow up article today: http://www.insidefacebook.com/2011/06/13/available-data-shows-facebook-user-numbers-growing-quickly-or-slowly-or-falling/ This article indicates that other reporting source cannot corroborate the initial findings, and ComScore number in the US match the trends I’ve mentioned for Canada.

As a branding tool, I wonder what  the value is for a single impression? We use frequency to try and make a lasting impression on a user, but how can we estimate how many impressions are needed if we don’t know how much impact a single impression has?

Consider a webpage I viewed recently:

As you click each thumbnail  picture at the bottom of the page it would be displayed in the main image area. What’s important to note is that each time a new pic was shown in the main image is a new page view – so viewing all 34 house pics would mean 34 page views.

This is important, as each time there is a new page view there is also a new ad impression. The Tide ad in the upper right was therefore served to me 32 times (a different ad appeared twice during this period).  It took me about a minute to cycle through all the pics, so each impression lasted about 2 seconds. On the flip side of this, if I had been reading  an article that was mostly text, I would have spent about the same amount of time on the page, but would have only been served a single impression.

So how do we determine how effective an impression is supposed to be? In this example, those 32 impressions would have had the same impact as a single impression on a text based page;  therefore, not all impressions have the same impact.  Perhaps we need to look at the average time spend per page view to determine the average impact of a impression? Next time I’ll take a look at internet averages for the internet, as well as a few major sites, and try to determine what the time value of an impression might be.

From Alexander:

Interesting article on the effectiveness of Groupon:

From Jacquie:

Since we’re on a blog, I thought I would share this emarketer article about the importance of corporate blogs.

From Shannon:

I find this an interesting story to follow.  Germans government required Google to provide residents the option to opt in or out of street view.  A mere 3% chose to not take part in the initiative, but at least they were given the option.

Of course I have to put in a shameless plug for the new macbook air.  As much as I would love to get one, I still am not convinced that I would not destroy it by dropping it, gently smashing it against something in my purse, or trying to plug something into it with my She-Ra strength.  I still think they are really neat, and am always amazed at how small technology can get.

I’m going to let you all in on a little secret: the web can be a sleazy place. Well, maybe that’s not a secret, but I’m not talking about 2 girls and their cup of questionable content, or Nigerian businessmen that have an incredible offer to get rich if you send them $100.00; I’m referring to the day-to-day web you and I use every day.

The web can be a wondrous source of information and entertainment, often all rolled up into one eye-popping image – enter the infographic. You may not recognize the word, but I’m sure you’ve seen them: images containing all sorts of interesting facts about something, laid out in an interesting way and full of pictures and charts to make the numbers fun. Check out this neato infographic about water:

(Click image for full view)

Simple. Easy to read. Full of fun facts that you can pass along to coworkers. What you’re probably not thinking is that this image’s sole purpose is to manipulate the web and destroy all that is good in this world (May be a slight exaggeration). How is it doing this? By manipulating SEO – search engine optimization.

The goal of most revenue-generating websites is to bring in site traffic; whether the site makes money from ads, links, or selling things online, they depend on traffic, and most sites rely on Google to get it. You type in a keyword on Google, and all sorts of relevant sites full of useful information pop up in the search results – or at least that’s what you think happens.  In reality, sites with no useful information that often do nothing other than link to other sites often dominate your search results. These sites know they offer nothing of substance and manipulate SEO to get high rankings in search results. One of the ways that they do this is by using infographics.

In a perfect world (wide web) the best sites would come up in Google searches. They’d reach the top of the list by having quality content that users find relevant and useful. In the real world, garbage site jig the system to try and get you to visit their awful, useless sites like this one:

If you were to search for the term “Online Education” this site may well appear in your search results. But don’t be fooled, this site offers no real content; its sole reason for existence is to get you to click on the links to other sites. This is how they make their money. Essentially it is just an extra step between Google and where you want to be, designed to make money off your searches. Google spends a fair bit of time working to prevent this, as it’s in their best interest to make Google searches as useful as possible; however, many people are employed full time to find ways to beat Google too. Each time Google closes a vulnerability,  it’s only a matter of time before someone figures out a new loop hole.

But how does this relate to Infographics?

Check out where the water infographic comes from:

Online education dot net. The infographic is hosted by the same crappy site that has absolutely nothing to do with water – so why would they post this? The reason is that if enough people view the infographic, if enough people share and repost it, if they do this enough times with enough infographics, eventually their site will start appearing in your Google search results, even though it offers absolutely no value to you. I’m not going to explain how that is done in this post, but be assured that when you are viewing this infographic – you are supporting pure evil!

Of course, not all infographics are link-bait, and many are put out by quality sites that do offer useful content. What I’m referring to is sites with no relevant content that create infographics for the sole purpose of driving traffic to their garbage websites to manipulate SEO.

So what does this mean for you as an online advertiser?

It means that your site is fighting for online presence with other sites using nefarious practices to gain an unfair advantage. It means that your great site, full of relevant content, may rank lower than a garbage affiliate site. It means that you may need to turn to paid Adwords to get a front page presence, and end up paying more than you should to get the attention your site deserves. (We can help with that )

This problem is not just limited to infographics, and it’s more widespread than you may think. Many popular bloggers and websites are paid to embed links in their posts, or re-post infographics. To get as sense of how nefarious and widespread this problem really is, I suggest reading this post by a person who made a living doing what I’ve described:  http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/d7e24/my_job_was_to_game_digg_using_infographics_voting/

The more you know.