This morning over muesli I read this TechRadar article about Facebook’s growth, titled “Farmville is bigger than Twitter,” which breathlessly reports various exciting numbers, including this gem:
When it comes to the site’s online chat function, 1.6 billion messages are sent every single day and 1.4 million photos are uploaded a second.
Ok, so this photo number is wrong: 1.4million photos per second is 3.6 trillion per month, or roughly 20 photos uploaded for every person on the planet every day.
You could call this a typo, but the fact that not even very basic fact checking was done on this article makes all the other figures suspect as well.
But don’t worry, TechRadar, you’re not alone. A few weeks ago Fortune magazine reported about Facebook game Farmville that:
On any given day 500,000 tractors are sold on the Internet. But don’t start buying stock in John Deere or Caterpillar just yet. These are $20 “virtual” tractors that belong to the 50 million players of FarmVille, the largest and fastest-growing social game on the Internet.
That’s $10 million in tractor-revenue per day, or $3.6 billion a year. I’m sure Zynga is doing well, but not that well. Yet Fortune put this plainly-false figure in the lede of their article.
What’s going on here?
Not journalism, that’s for sure.
Posted on 3 December 2009
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For purposes of public discourse, all numbers ending in -illion are equal.
This is also why political debates that touch on finance are so infuriating.
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stupidity is happening here, I’ll say. It’s just like the crap that’s spread about linux vs windows+mac. How windows/mac is easier, support more hardware (ha! try finding all your drivers in a minute) and how linux is only immune to viruses because of popularity (or the lack thereof).
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um…… what?
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Grind that axe much?
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1.6 billion messages per day sounds right for a Facebook-sized network.
I think the photo numbers are for downloaded photos, not uploaded. It sounds plausible.
About the Farmville tractors – that number sounds very high. I doubt they can sustain those figures more than a few days, not much longer. (But common people of the internet are willing to pay for very crazy things)
(Disclaimer: I work for a competing social network)
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Um, “sounds right” is the problem here. The article is about fact checking.
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Speaking of numbers, when asked about our mail activity for a 12000 user deployment of Groupwise, our mail admin would say we do about 100000 mails an hour.
I knew it was wrong just by doing the mental math and applying it to our userbase, but of course he was counting groupwise status messages and other smtp transactional messages as well.
Of course this allowed our mail admin to get beefier servers and more storage, so maybe he was just playing the numbers game to his advantage
By the way, I was converted to Linux after seeing you and Guy do a SLED9 demo in Johannesburg many years ago.
Never got to say thanks!
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On the mail stats, I’m not sure how unreasonable those numbers are. We have a 5000 user environment and although we do not track total message traffic at that level I can tell you for sure that between 1.5-3 million messages per day are incoming from the Internet into our GroupWise system. I have no idea how many internal (post office to post office) messages per day we handle are but I bet it is a lot more. But you are right, 1.4 million photos per second seems kind of silly. I would like to know the real numbers though.
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Facebook posts their statistics @
http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics
(Easily found with a simple search on “The Google”.)According to Facebook’s own website, there are “more than” 2.5 billion photos posted per month. That’s more than 964.5 photos per second… which is still a lot… but 1.4 million is quite a bit “more than” 964.5 photos per second.
Any time an editor sees a number thrown around, especially if it’s some unfathomable number like a trillion, red flags should fly and warning bells should immediately sound in their head. It seems like it would be obvious to do simple fact checking on things like this. It should be all the more important to check for an article primarily based on numbers.
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@kennon
I couldn’t remember the actual figure. It was ridiculous though as it was supposedly based on a measurement of number of messages through a core mta, divided by number of uses at head office and then multiplied over all users including sleepy country-bumpkin types who have much less usage. Then it was multiplied by 24 and used in a stat about mails / day. Ignoring the fact that the organisation worked from about 7-5. However, he got the server + the hp storage box. Bully for him.
This will *not* work in the current economy, as you can imagine.
Sorry for off-topic comments
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Actually, this *is* journalism… or what passes for it these days.
I suppose you’ve noticed this in particular because the numbers relate to an area that you have expertise in, but I can assure you that many stories come out every day with equally poor attention to numbers.
Fact checking seems to have become a bit of a forgotten skill within the media.
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Apparently some spell-checking got passed over as well. It’s a “lead” not a “lede”. Pot & kettle?
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Lede is the news business jargon term: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lede_(news)
Both lede and lead are valid in this context.
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Right you are. My bad. Old school.
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“It’s a ‘lead’ not a ‘lede’. Pot & kettle?”
No–journalist vs. member of the Great Unwashed. Try looking up “lede”, Albioner.
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Lede is acceptable in journalism: http://www.nytimes.com/1990/11/18/magazine/on-language-hed-folo-my-lede-unhed.html
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@albioner You may want to check that yourself. Lede is an accepted and widely used word in some circles, mostly newspapers (journalism!)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/News_style
Cheers
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No, “lede” is correct — that’s the original, traditional spelling. “Lead” is the modern corruption that has entered modern usage, like “drinkable” or “flammable”.
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No, “lead” is the original and traditional spelling. “Lede” is a corruption introduced by printers because they already used “lead” (the metal) to refer to the spacing between lines of typeset copy.
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Ummm what’s wrong with “drinkable”?
Doesn’t it mean “potable” more or less. With a subjective angle maybe?
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@istoff: congratulations, you’re part of the problem. next time, please indicate clearly that you’re making up your made-up numbers.
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“That’s $10 million in tractor-revenue per day, or $3.6 billion a year.”
Only if you assume that these virtual “tractors” are only sold from Zynga to consumers for face value. I know nothing about social network virtual tractor sales — can users not sell their virtual tractors to other users?
$10M per day only sounds unreasonable if you assume it’s all going to one person. As a measure of how much business is transacted between users, it doesn’t seem that far off. If they do have 50 million players, then that means about 1/100 will buy a tractor on a given day, which sounds fair to me.
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Cutbacks in the news industry are making things worse all the time. You wouldn’t believe the pressure reporters and editors are under to produce more with less. Against their own better judgement, they all too often find themselves cutting corners to fulfil the expectations of publishers. I’m not blaming anyone — it just seems to be the current reality. Readers can help by voicing their displeasure to those in charge, thus demonstrating that good quality journalism is important to their bottom line.
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Check out this article: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13577_3-10378353-36.html
The reporter states that Twitter hit their five billionth tweet and that the user who posted the tweet is one “who formed its first loyal pack of users.”
As has been widely reported, Twitter increased their tweet ID twice, meaning the tweet with ID 5,000,000,000 isn’t the five billionth tweet.
In addition, the user who posted the tweet’s account is only 1.5 years old when Twitter has been around over 3.Why is it acceptable to be so sloppy when reporting about numbers or technology?
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I don’t know much about Farmville, but apparently those virtual tractors are being purchased with virtual dollars earned in the game as rewards for doing virtual things. The company may indeed be shuttling around 3.6 billion virtual dollars per year on tractors. Overall not _that_ different from the subprime real estate transactions of 2005 or so…
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Sounds more likely, but Fortune sure implied otherwise.
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The other “idiot check” on the photo number:
1.4 million photos per second, 24 * 60 * 60 = 86,400 seconds per day, = ~ 121,000 million photos per day.
Users send 1.6 billion messages each day, but upload 121 billion photos in the same time period? Not likely.
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Is it $20 virtual? That’d make much more sense. I imagine Farmville has some sort of in-game currency.
In the end, this is much ado about nothing as the problems with journalism run much deeper than a couple simple typos.
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I don’t personally play farmville, but my girlfriend does, and she says a tractor costs around 30 000 coins (which is their in game money) and depending on your level that might be a lot or not very much at all. I don’t know how much virtual money they give you for real money they spend, but I’d assume that tractors are mostly bought with in game money. In games like Pet Society there is in fact a large group of people who don’t spend money on the game at all, which leads to rather sad selling values of “cash coins” versus the standard in game money.
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See, now that’s very interesting. But it’s not at all what the Fortune article implied.
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Farmville actually has two forms of in-game currency – “coins” and “cash”. Both can be purchased with real money or earned in the game. However, coins are earned by planting and harvesting crops, trees or animals, and cash is earned at the rate of 1 Farmville dollar every time you “level up”.
Most small items can only be purchased with coins; on the other end, many special items can only be bought with Farmville dollars. And in the middle, several items can be purchased with either coins or cash. I wouldn’t be surprised to find that a tractor costs 20 Farmville dollars (or, as Marius says, 30k coins).
However, the point still stands – a casual reader who doesn’t have any knowledge of Farmville would certainly confuse that with real money. And Fortune magazine made a serious error by not pointing that out.
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That’s ok, the public doesn’t know the difference between the sizes of the -illion numbers. Just look to the government and their tossing around of numbers and spending.
Trillion, it’s the new billion! Come one guys… Get with the times!
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I pive in Sweden and because of you Americans (joke) the situation is even more mixed up.
The en-US system is called the “short” system, and all numbers end in “-illion” for every added 3 zeroes:
million
billion
trillion
etc..illionThe sv-SV system is the “long” system, where you reuse the leading part twice, and you switch between -ljon (=illion) and -ljard (=iliard if that existed):
miljon
miljard
biljon
biljard
triljon
triljard
etc-ljon
etc-ljardSo, one Swedish Biljon = one US trillion.
It’s rather confusing and often it seems journalists aren’t aware of this. And in IT where we use large numbers quite a lot (bytes for example) it’s even worse.
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The UK traditionally uses the million/milliard system too, but for all practical purposes we now use the American system. Even government numbers are in US billions.
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That’s like a bajillion combinations!
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pive==live – typo, sorry
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It’s not just numbers that are falling to the editorial wayside. This quote is from Maxim. Anybody slightly familiar with Bangkok would know how messed up this is:
…A vast open-air sex market, the Patpong is a 20-minute walk from the hotel, past the U.S. and British embassies; an X-rated bazaar that looks like a psychedelic Bourbon Street. This is where they filmed The Deer Hunter to simulate wartime Saigon. The Patpong is divided into Soi 4, which is predominantly gay; Soi Cowboy, a note-perfect re-creation of pre-Disney Times Square, designed to cater to the Western tourist; and Nana Plaza, which is where they keep the kink. Girls in baby-doll nighties with numbers around their necks loll on red-velvet cushions behind a wall of glass, like a giant aquarium. In a far corner a Thai guy with a cash register on a rickety wooden table rings up the sales. Looking for answers at the dodgy Nana Hotel, I meet a striking-looking child bride who calls herself A. She pours herself into my lap. Like everyone I talk to in the Patpong, she doesn’t know anything about Carradine, but for 10,000 baht (roughly $300 in U.S. currency) she will come back to my hotel, tie me up, choke me, and stay the night. I take a rain check…
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the extime bad number is 666. Its devins number
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