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A few days ago freelance writer Laura Spencer (@TXWriter) tweeted a link to a Mashable post. The hyped up headline read “Facebook Now Controls 41% of Social Media Traffic.” Before I even read the post my gut screamed “Bullshit!” It often does that. My gut is rather talented at sniffing out shady statistics. It must be that past life in PR where we all learn that statistics can say just about anything we want them to if we twist them enough (my disgust of that attitude makes me hypersensitive to them now).

Then I did read the article. What I found was baffling (okay, it wasn’t really — it was about what I expected):

• Charts with no reference points related to the supposed trends shown
• Assumptions about people jumping from one site to another without any real evidence to back that up (and data charts right in the post that contradicted the claim)
• Other statistical claims that didn’t jive with the “relative” charts shown in the post
• Big social media sites being completely left out of the comparison
• Whole niches of social media completely left out of the comparison
• Sites that probably shouldn’t have been included but were
• A huge social media site included in the first set of stats suddenly disappeared from later ones

Yikes. I bet you’re wondering why I haven’t linked you to the post yet. That’s because it seems to have gone “Poof!” Vanished into thin air it did. Because of that I won’t pull the actual charts to show you the problems (doesn’t seem right to publish their charts when they’ve pulled them — especially when it wasn’t even clear in the post if they belonged to Mashable or were Comscore charts taken somewhat out of context). However, I do want to highlight something from the cached version which illustrates my biggest problem of all: [click to continue…]

facebook, mashable, myspace, statistics, youtube

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