What Numbers are Real?

New lines of thought on new media and participation numbers.

In the Nielsen era, ratings were based on a percentage of the TVs tuned to a certain show. Notice, tuned to. Doesn't mean watching, cause you really can tell that. And the audience was extrapolated from a sampling.

So it was a potential audience.

The Audit Bureau provided circulation numbers for newspapers. How many were delivered, how many are subscribers. But the number says the potential total number who could have read a story or advertisement, not how many actually did.

Today, click through is a big factor in advertising, and the numbers are just fractions of the two big legacy measures. In the business, chasing after on-line becomes known as "trading real dollars for digital dimes."

I've heard a lot lately from folks focusing on their Facebook pages and numbers. Oooh, there's 80,000 friends of the page, we should focus there; not on the 8,000 on a Twitter feed or 800 in an interactive blog. Those are made up numbers, but the proportions are not too far off -- they each appear on face value to be orders of magnitude in difference.

Let's run through those. Just like Nielsen and ABC, 80K is the potential audience. Facebook's metrics will tell you the actual participation is much different -- maybe only half the 80K is active user base, then of that maybe 1/4 actually clicked on the item; of that 1/10th liked or commented.

Same applies often to the Twitter feed -- just because 8K follow doesn't mean 8K read.

Why do you put some much value in the smallest of the numbers -- the interactive blogs? Because you know they were there, they took time to participate and more than likely, they lingered (79% at UA) more than one minute on the page to be a part of the event.

So tell me, if only 600 to 1,800 of an 80K Facebook group read/like/comment; if only 800 of an 8K twitter feed take the time to retweet (and it's often more like 80); and 800 were in the interactive blog . . . .

At the end of the day, the numbers of actual participation, consumption of message and integration into the group are really about the same.