[Foundation-l] It Is not Us

Sun Jun 26 15:07:05 UTC 2011

What lovely abuse of statistics!

By showing them indexed to the same scale, it makes it impossible to
draw the conclusion they try and draw. You need to know the *absolute*
increase in facebook usage and the *absolute* increase or decline in
total internet usage. If their numbers are correct, then facebook is
growing at the expense of the rest of the internet, but without the
absolute numbers you can't tell if it's doing so to a significant
extent.

You really need to look at the growth in total internet usage pre- and
post-facebook as well. I expect the existence of facebook has caused a
noticeable increase in total internet usage (compared to pre-existing
trend). It is creating new internet minutes, not stealing them from
other sites.

You should probably also look at Facebook's direct competitors. For
example, usage of MySpace has declined enormously - a lot of
Facebook's growth may have come from that decline. The article
suggests Facebook is hurting the rest of the internet, but if it's
really only hurting other social networking sites, then there is
nothing to worry about.

The most important data for us to look at is here:
http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesPageViewsMonthlyAllProjects.htm.
While that does show a year-on-year decline, that actually because of
a spike a year ago (I don't know why). If you smooth things out a bit,
we are seeing growth (albeit fairly low growth). What the rest of the
internet is doing isn't really important.

On 25 June 2011 15:03, Fred Bauder <fredbaud at fairpoint.net> wrote:
> The web itself is passé
>
> http://www.businessinsider.com/chart-of-the-day-facebook-vs-the-rest-of-the-web-2011-6
>
> Actually, we missed the boat, but that ship sailed long ago.
>
> Fred
>
>
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