Google gets yet another hit as I search the phrase "There are lies, damn lies and statistics" which incidentally (according to Wikipedia) is attributed in the U.S. to Mark Twain who attributed it to Benjamin Disraeli, who apparently never said it and so it is now attributed to Charles Wentworth Dilke who nobody knows, which is not all that interesting. It is much more interesting to have a clever quote attributed to Mark Twain who after all did repeat it. All this is very much like statistics themselves. They get passed around and nobody really knows who started it and how true they might be. Also as the Dilke quote suggests they are open to interpretation. One thing about statistics which is true is that they are repeated, truncated and paraphrased in order to prove a point.
According to TG Daily, in August 2008 YouTube surpassed Yahoo for the number two search spot in terms of numbers of search requests. That's interesting as a headline but I wonder what kinds of searches are being requested at each site. Intuitively I am willing to believe that people use Google and Yahoo similarly but are people making the same types of search requests at YouTube? I have no way of knowing but I suspect people are making different kinds of searches at YouTube and it would be interesting to know how these searches differ.
There is a very interesting article at Mashable tilted "Youtube Surpasses Two Billion Video Views Daily" which is interesting and thought provoking. However buried in a list of statistical "Interesting Facts" at the bottom of the article is the factoid "70% of YouTube's traffic comes from outside the U.S." I personally think that is fascinating and revealing because we generally ethnocentric thinking Americans think that these Internet statistic reflect us and how Americans are using the Internet. It is very important to get the full picture. This also makes perfect sense when you consider that most of the world does not have access to the diversity of entertainment and television programming that is available to most Americans - - of course the rest of the world would turn to YouTube. However these types of statistics are used to toll the death knell of broadcast and cable TV when the truth is according to this statistic, about 700 million Americans per day make searches on Youtube - - impressive but somehow this does not seem as newsworthy.
Now in August 2010 Alexa reported that YouTube knocked Yahoo out of the third position of "most visited sites." Which on the surface is interesting but what does that really mean? It might be interesting if you are looking to allocate dollars to an ad campaign and are looking for the most visited websites. But the ranking in this article was #1 Google, #2 Facebook, #3 YouTube and #4 Yahoo. In my estimation this says more about how people are using the Internet. I do not see that these websites (with the exception of Google and Yahoo) are necessarily in competition with one another. Arguably YouTube is also a search engine but again, intuitively I believe it is being used differently.
Most recently, November 2010, CNN has declared that Facebook has overtaken Google in terms of traffic. Again interesting but it seems people are suggesting that somehow this means Google is slipping. It seems to me that the message is people are spending more time chatting with friends and co-workers then they are generally querying the Internet.
These statistics are interesting and I think they do help us to understand how the Internet is being used. It is clear that the Internet is moving from a research based medium to more of an entertainment and communication medium. But I caution that this does not mean that the Internet has ceased to be an information medium. It simply means that in the evolutionary process more functionality is being layered on to it. In the beginning of the process, due to the limitations of technology, searches were the only options available and sites like Yahoo and later Google dominated. Now with the addition of high speed access, faster processors and a more robust infrastructure we can have streaming video and live interaction.
In summary I simply caution that when you see some of these statistical headlines that you be sure to delve a bit deeper to try and understand the bigger picture in an attempt to separate the lies from the damn lies.
Reno Lovison is the owner of Reno Lovison Marketing
http://www.renoweb.net providing web video for growing businesses and the executive producer at
http://www.authorbroadcast.com specializing in video book trailers helping publishers and authors promote their books via video.
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http://EzineArticles.com/?Seventy-Percent-of-YouTube-Traffic-Is-International...] Seventy Percent of YouTube Traffic Is International
