I had to share this fron The Street Com. It is very good!
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Andy Kessler: Don't Believe the Hype
By Andy Kessler
Special to TheStreet.com
6/16/98 10:15 AM ET
I don't know about you, but I'm believing less and less of what's on the
Net. I'm talking not about content like TSC, but things like user surveys
or page-impression statistics.
Here's why. In the late '70s, there was an online game called multitrek,
which stood for multiuser star trek. This was a popular character-based
game that worked on CRTs, the old, dumb terminals that were hooked to
mainframes and minicomputers. A 10-by-10 matrix of dots would appear
on your screen: * were stars, B were bases, K were Klingons, etc. If
you played it alone, you roamed around the galaxy killing Klingons, but
multitrek also allowed you to kill other people logged on to some
machine, usually a university minicomputer. Early Apple computers
were around, as were Tandy TRS-80s (trash-80's).
I worked with a programmer one summer who had a Tandy box and
was an avid multitrek player. He was good, but he found that he could
write a simple program on his PC that would figure out where all the
other players were, aim his weapon, rapid-fire and kill everyone before
they knew he was even there. Neat stuff. Eventually other players
complained, so they changed the rules to make them stricter and to slow
the input of keystrokes, but this guy figured out other ways to beat the
thing.
I thought of this when I read the Forbes and the New York Times
articles about Jeff Citron and the boys at Datek. Similar to that
programmers approach to multitrek, they found a high-stakes game
called Nasdaq, figured out the rules and then wrote programs that could
instantly execute trades or strategies faster than anyone typing by
hand. Perfectly legal but they pissed everyone off, so the rules got
stricter. But never underestimate the power of someone writing code to
beat a system set up for human key-presses or mouse clicks.
Which brings us to the Web. People magazine's Web site ran a poll for
the 50 most beautiful people. It allowed write-in votes and some
wiseguy Howard Stern fan wrote in Hank the Angry Drunken Dwarf, a
frequent guest on the radio show. OK, that's funny, but over the next
few days, angry Hank's 200,000-plus votes were easily beating
Leonardo DiCaprio's 7,500, and the poll turned into a sham. Now, I
don't know this for a fact, but I can almost guarantee that some clever
programmer executed a script that constantly hit the site and voted for
Hank.
The Wall Street Journal ran a piece on a Time magazine online poll
asking whether the U.S. should support China or India in the nuclear
race. China started winning and then out of nowhere India caught up
and passed China in the poll. Grassroots movement -- or maybe some
clever Indian programmer writing a quick piece of code that fixed that
poll for good.
There's a whole class of Internet stocks whose valuations are based on
revenue generated from Internet advertising. That advertising is based
on hits and page views and large volumes of traffic. My view is these
statistics are potentially suspect and increasingly may not be
meaningful. Now, I am certainly not accusing anyone of doctoring
numbers, but it's so easy to do.
Transactions like online sales or customers redirected to an advertiser's
site are the only ones that count. The Web is not a billboard, although it
certainly seems like one. The Web is a medium to conduct commerce,
just as 800 numbers are a medium to conduct commerce. Be suspicious
of companies that base their fortunes on a billboard business. Page
impressions that generate transactions are what counts. The rest may
just be angry, drunken programmers having fun. " |
