Ze Frank, Rocketboom,and the Problems with Numbers

Posted by: Heather Green on October 25

By questioning Andrew Baron about Rocketboom’s download numbers, Ze Frank shows just how hard it is to use public numbers to show traffic at an online video site. Web stats are hard to understand and can be misleading, so it’s hard to know who is right without some digging.

The number that’s being disputed is the 300,000 daily downloads. The only way to do that right now is by looking at the server files. Relying on publicly available stats from a service like Alexa doesn’t make any sense when it comes to a video site. Especially one that’s distributed a lot of different ways. Again, we’re talking about downloads a day. Something Alexa doesn’t count.

Then of course, there is the whole question of how these downloads are counted. And how downloads are measured across different services, such as Akamai, RSS services, Tivo, and phones. To be entirely trustworthy, you might compare them to Ze’s numbers or have someone who knows the podcast arena be able to make a call across these podcasts.

I asked Andrew to look at his files with the help of a consultant and he agreed. I hope to get back with some answers tomorrow.

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