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Statistics in general are not all they are cracked up to be, so beware, especially of those that relate to the Web.
There are lies, damned lies, and statistics."
Lord Acton or Benjamin Disraeli or Mark Twain first said this. Attributions vary. But whoever it was, he meant that you can do anything with statistics, innocently (but damagingly) if you don't understand numbers, and manipulatively if you have an agenda.
I've spent the last few weeks immersed in Internet and e-commerce statistics, of which there are volumes. It's clear that Internet "statistics" are, as often as not, an amalgam of guesswork, wishful thinking, pie-in-the-sky optimism, end-of-the-world pessimism, and trivial commonplaces.
I will group the "information" I've gleaned into four categories:
1) Useful or at least intersting
2) Useless
3) Bad
4) Scary
5) Innumerate (innumeracy is to numbers as illiteracy is to words.)
I have confined myself to U.S. data not only to preserve my sanity, but also because of the law of large numbers. In a huge country, statistics (provided they're real) are more stable than those from other places.
1) Useful Information
Who trusts ads? You'd think no one would, but in a research environment, people don't want to portray themselves as absolute, 100 percent skeptics. So according to Forrester Research, 35 percent of adults trust ads in newspapers; 30 percent in magazines; 25 percent on radio; 24 percent on TV (you gotta be kidding!); 18 percent in direct mail; 14 percent on the Internet.
There is a precise correlation here between the longevity of the medium and its trustworthiness. Newspapers are the oldest medium, the Internet the newest. Exception: Direct mail, which has been around for at least 130 years. But direct mail's ease of entry-all you need is a stamp, a piece of paper, and someone's address-makes it available to any thief or maniac who can read and write, a fact that has eternally compromised the medium's credibility.
* What's the demographic profile of the average Internet user in the U.S., in the year 2000? A bit younger, a bit more male, a bit whiter, a fair amount wealthier ($57,000 household income vs. $42,000), significantly more educated (41 percent college graduate vs. 22 percent), and more...