5 ms·

Are Posterous Fudging Visitor Statistics?

53 points by ig1 16y ago

benologist 16y ago
They're just counting views in a particularly unrealistic but technically not incorrect way. Seems to be pretty much par for the course, like when twitter announces a billion new users, most of which are probably bots and/or quora.
- ig1 16y ago
  The test has to be what your users understand that value to mean. I'm betting almost all Posterous users think they're being read by significantly more people than they actually are. If Posterous can't provide meaningful stats (and I appreciate that filtering out bots may be non-trivial) then they should just avoid providing stats altogether. Bad data is worse than no data as it's much more misleading.
  - benologist 16y ago
    I agree with you, but no company's going to leap forward and be honest about numbers, they're going to use whichever makes them look biggest/growing strongest to their users, investors and competitors, and all the numbers are "right" in some context.
    - ig1 16y ago
      "Our goal is to be 100% transparent with everything we do at Posterous, especially when it affects your blog and content" -Sachin cofounder, posterous.com From: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1309849 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1309849
  - nostrademons 16y ago
    For a site whose key value proposition is vanity - is it really? HotOrNot scales all ratings by (rating / 2 + 5.0), i.e. everybody's above average. According to the post by James Hong where he mentioned this, they seem to have found a notable increase in user satisfaction with the change. Is it any different from Victoria Secret bras running a cup size or three higher than everyone else, or dress sizes continually shifting downwards, or SAT scores being recentered upwards by 100 points?
twoism 16y ago
http://help.posterous.com/how-are-site-and-post-views-calculated http://help.posterous.com/how-are-site-and-post-views-calcul...
radicaldreamer 16y ago
There are many things that trigger a "view" for a post and a site: viewing the blog triggers a view for all posts visible on that page. In addition, a view will be triggered by the blog post page itself, bots and crawlers, and http://posterous.com/explore http://posterous.com/explore. View counts are updated every five minutes. Google Analytics is better at measuring visitors and filtering out impressions triggered by search engine bots, crawlers, or indexers. See this page for how to set up Google Analytics on your Posterous site: http://help.posterous.com/how-to-add-google-analytics-to-your-site http://help.posterous.com/how-to-add-google-analytics-to-you...
greattypo 16y ago
Terrible title. "Fudging statistics" and "not actively excluding bots" are totally different.
- ig1 16y ago
  I did actually check a dictionary before I used that term and the definition of "Present or deal with (something) in a vague, noncommittal, or inadequate way" seemed suitable.
Xuzz 16y ago
(Unrelated/offtopic: is "are" or "is" correct in the title?)
- icey 16y ago
  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).
  - duck 16y ago
    I didn't know that difference and was wondering the same thing, thanks. It is funny how that subtle difference made me read the title like five times to understand it.
  - ewjordan 16y ago
    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've memorized ETS's stance on that particular grammar point, IMO, but that's the SAT for you...
    - mootothemax 16y ago
      "The United States of America (is/are) ...", where in US English "is" is the correct version. Interesting, I didn't know that. I'd have presumed that one would use "is" when referring to the country, and "are" when referring to the group of states. Is this incorrect? (for what it's worth, I'm from the UK ;)
    - bodhi 16y ago
      > 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.
rantfoil 16y ago
Our focus is on building the best product. It so happens to be that we are aware of the issue and recommend that you use Google Analytics for deeper insight into visitors and views. Here is a bit of how-the-sausage is made, but you wouldn't believe how much of a negative response we got from existing users once we went to a fully JavaScript analytics system. So by sheer volume of user input we made the decision to return to the original http request method of counting views. We are continuing to look at ways to improve this system, possibly with Mixpanel.
- ig1 16y ago
  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://adamriggins.com/posterous-post-views-and-google-analytics-dis http://adamriggins.com/posterous-post-views-and-google-analy... Whenever Posterous has given a response the focus has been on disabled javascript, etc. rather than the fact most of these views are likely generated by bots. For example the email you sent to the user here: http://www.creativenotice.com/how-posterous-stats-work http://www.creativenotice.com/how-posterous-stats-work Given the values are essentially meaningless why show them to your users at all ?
  - ig1 16y ago
    Also I imagine you're going to get a very large negative response when you switch to a working method that's going to be along the lines of "where have all my visitors gone". By talking about "deeper insight" rather than just openly admitting the data is just bad you're just delaying the inevitable backlash.
  - rantfoil 16y ago
    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 or visited your blog post was. Also, they're realtime, which GA does not provide.
j2d2j2d2 16y ago
They indeed fibbed during their campaign about how posterous is better than blog brand x. Specifically, about tumblr not supporting an email posting option.
invisiblefunnel 16y ago
Posterous is/are in touch with what users want from a blogging platform, but they seem to be out of touch with how users expect to be treated.[edit: grammar]
aufreak3 16y ago
I've noticed that as soon as I submit a new post to posterous, it gets about 24 views. I'm quite sure those aren't people.
webuiarchitect 16y ago
Those counts actually includes hits by the spiders, too.

53 points by ig1 16y ago

They're just counting views in a particularly unrealistic but technically not incorrect way. Seems to be pretty much par for the course, like when twitter announces a billion new users, most of which are probably bots and/or quora.

ig1 16y ago
The test has to be what your users understand that value to mean. I'm betting almost all Posterous users think they're being read by significantly more people than they actually are. If Posterous can't provide meaningful stats (and I appreciate that filtering out bots may be non-trivial) then they should just avoid providing stats altogether. Bad data is worse than no data as it's much more misleading.
- benologist 16y ago
  I agree with you, but no company's going to leap forward and be honest about numbers, they're going to use whichever makes them look biggest/growing strongest to their users, investors and competitors, and all the numbers are "right" in some context.
  - ig1 16y ago
    "Our goal is to be 100% transparent with everything we do at Posterous, especially when it affects your blog and content" -Sachin cofounder, posterous.com From: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1309849 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1309849
- nostrademons 16y ago
  For a site whose key value proposition is vanity - is it really? HotOrNot scales all ratings by (rating / 2 + 5.0), i.e. everybody's above average. According to the post by James Hong where he mentioned this, they seem to have found a notable increase in user satisfaction with the change. Is it any different from Victoria Secret bras running a cup size or three higher than everyone else, or dress sizes continually shifting downwards, or SAT scores being recentered upwards by 100 points?

twoism 16y ago

http://help.posterous.com/how-are-site-and-post-views-calculated http://help.posterous.com/how-are-site-and-post-views-calcul...

radicaldreamer 16y ago

There are many things that trigger a "view" for a post and a site: viewing the blog triggers a view for all posts visible on that page. In addition, a view will be triggered by the blog post page itself, bots and crawlers, and http://posterous.com/explore http://posterous.com/explore. View counts are updated every five minutes. Google Analytics is better at measuring visitors and filtering out impressions triggered by search engine bots, crawlers, or indexers. See this page for how to set up Google Analytics on your Posterous site: http://help.posterous.com/how-to-add-google-analytics-to-your-site http://help.posterous.com/how-to-add-google-analytics-to-you...

greattypo 16y ago

Terrible title. "Fudging statistics" and "not actively excluding bots" are totally different.

ig1 16y ago
I did actually check a dictionary before I used that term and the definition of "Present or deal with (something) in a vague, noncommittal, or inadequate way" seemed suitable.

Xuzz 16y ago

(Unrelated/offtopic: is "are" or "is" correct in the title?)

icey 16y ago
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).
- duck 16y ago
  I didn't know that difference and was wondering the same thing, thanks. It is funny how that subtle difference made me read the title like five times to understand it.
- ewjordan 16y ago
  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've memorized ETS's stance on that particular grammar point, IMO, but that's the SAT for you...
  - mootothemax 16y ago
    "The United States of America (is/are) ...", where in US English "is" is the correct version. Interesting, I didn't know that. I'd have presumed that one would use "is" when referring to the country, and "are" when referring to the group of states. Is this incorrect? (for what it's worth, I'm from the UK ;)
  - bodhi 16y ago
    > 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.

rantfoil 16y ago

Our focus is on building the best product. It so happens to be that we are aware of the issue and recommend that you use Google Analytics for deeper insight into visitors and views. Here is a bit of how-the-sausage is made, but you wouldn't believe how much of a negative response we got from existing users once we went to a fully JavaScript analytics system. So by sheer volume of user input we made the decision to return to the original http request method of counting views. We are continuing to look at ways to improve this system, possibly with Mixpanel.

ig1 16y ago
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://adamriggins.com/posterous-post-views-and-google-analytics-dis http://adamriggins.com/posterous-post-views-and-google-analy... Whenever Posterous has given a response the focus has been on disabled javascript, etc. rather than the fact most of these views are likely generated by bots. For example the email you sent to the user here: http://www.creativenotice.com/how-posterous-stats-work http://www.creativenotice.com/how-posterous-stats-work Given the values are essentially meaningless why show them to your users at all ?
- ig1 16y ago
  Also I imagine you're going to get a very large negative response when you switch to a working method that's going to be along the lines of "where have all my visitors gone". By talking about "deeper insight" rather than just openly admitting the data is just bad you're just delaying the inevitable backlash.
- rantfoil 16y ago
  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 or visited your blog post was. Also, they're realtime, which GA does not provide.

j2d2j2d2 16y ago

They indeed fibbed during their campaign about how posterous is better than blog brand x. Specifically, about tumblr not supporting an email posting option.

invisiblefunnel 16y ago

Posterous is/are in touch with what users want from a blogging platform, but they seem to be out of touch with how users expect to be treated.[edit: grammar]

aufreak3 16y ago

I've noticed that as soon as I submit a new post to posterous, it gets about 24 views. I'm quite sure those aren't people.

webuiarchitect 16y ago

Those counts actually includes hits by the spiders, too.