Numb and numb-er…
Not a single day goes by without mind-boggling statistics being flung around the media. I guess if I had an app, service or software suite I’d want to put out those ‘startling’ metrics too to say ‘look, we are growing’ to everyone. But it seems that these days some of them are so big and so frequently updated that they…well become a bit meaningless. I gloss over the numbers quickly now knowing that in about a month a subsequent press release will go out touting even higher ones. And anyway, numbers are just that – a number. For me, its all about the ‘usage’ by consumers. YouTube we all know has a large user base. But even with YT, ‘views’ don’t really tell you the whole story. Click on a video on YT, watch for 10 seconds and you get counted as a ‘view’. A bit meaningless if you ask me, you didn’t watch the entire video but a mere 10 seconds. With apps, there are many #1 apps of the week/month, etc. but we all have apps that we’ve downloaded and used maybe 10 times and now removed from our phones and tablets.
Aren’t we all kidding ourselves just a little bit? There has to be a better way without diving into Google analytics for every domain, app and install on the planet. Again, I understand why a company puts this out, but it just seemed to mean so much more when Netscape and 56k baud modems were around. (Yikes, I’m dating myself).
Just a few ‘real’ examples are below (I have removed the names of the co.’s to protect the innocent).
*record breaking 41M requests for Tablets total; Both mobile & tablet usage "remained high"– making up 30% of overall requests – or 81M requests in total; 8.1M daily requests….
*has so far been seen by 162m…
*517m unique visitors/mo; previous record set at 492m in May 2012; monthly page requests have increased from 17.1b to 21.3b.
*adding 10s of 1,000s of xxx every week; 100s of 1,000s of files being shared.
*hits 100M RSVPs; 13.5M members; avg 70+ RSVPs/min.
*500k+ xxx created in last 2 wks, 3M new readers for a total of 53M (+6%); 6B pages flipped/mo; 50% of 2.0 users reading mags every day;
*iOS app has 2.5M downloads & became…
*now working w/ 1k+ brands & more than half of top 1k publishers on web; processing more than 800k transactions/se
*service now holds more than 2 trillion objects; up from 1T last June & 1.3T in Nov; it now regularly sees peaks of over 1.1M requests/sec;
*has over 680M mobile users & that over 81% of iOS apps and 70% of top 100 grossing Android apps integrate with…
Open to all suggestions because I don’t have any substantive ones. I’m still thinking….
