How reliable are internet statistics

Computers are supposed to be super exact, and current processing capacity is supposed to ensure that. Yet, the more I come to think of it, they are a tad unreliable.

Try matching statistics within a site itself, and you get wonderfully conflicting information. Harmonizing more than one site is breathtaking. You never get figures that add up.

Take the statistics in blogger and wordpress. The number of page views in different areas of admin never add up.

Trying to make sense of visits to your website, to control adwords costs is a joke. The site admin might say 500 people visit your site from google during a month, then adwords says 600 clicks! Or sometimes the other way around. The numbers never harmonize.

More than once I wonder about them clicks…

Getting adsense to make sense with pages visited is also a major mathematical dilemma. Could never do it.

Then, there are the unreliable statistics generated by b2evolution, another blogging software. There are identifiable items in the admin area, and unidentifiable. You never know how much your blog is really being viewed only by robots or by actual people. I suspect most web traffic is generated by search engine robots and spam robots. I get tons of Russian visitors, anywhere I go…And my sites have nothing to do with Russia.

Additionally, something has happened with google searches and b2evolution. A couple of years back, I could get the search term for almost every google search on he admin area, now, it is either a lot of unexplained repetition, or nothing. This certainly does not help matters at all.

Plus spam still rules. Email, in blogging software.

In facebook things are not better. I used to get wildly oscillating number of friends for a while. Sometimes, the variation would be as much as ten during a day. This is quite surprising, for a site that is supposedly run by state of the art equipment and software…

So, next time anybody quotes you web statistics, just laugh on his(her) face, it is all hogwash.

Facebook, friendship redefined

I used to get these notices from facebook, saying that the network did not allow adding people you don’ t know, even threatening removal of the account. I never got the account removed, however, I did manage to add a few thousand people I did not know.

No surprising the rule did not get me removed. Part of FB’s success is not following through on the very rules it creates. Nowadays, a good example is the non-pornography rules. There are tons of soft-porn profiles, some of which are “recommended” as subscriptions by the site itself.

Among my interests is car racing. So, I got to add quite a few drivers, old and new. The young ones are funny.

They will add anybody, whether or not they know you, when they are mostly unknown and beginning their career, I suppose hoping you are a journalist or prospective sponsor, or a real die hard fan. A fan a la Flight of the Concords, which has a single fan, if you know what I mean.

Once they advance a little bit in racing, they simply drop you! It happened to me with an American driver who went as far as GP2 and a French one who is in DTM. I suppose they figure people like me are not all that interesting, no money or rides will come from me, so they start adding pit babes .

I don’t mind. In all honesty, I kinda see Facebook in a pragmatic fashion as well.

Post adolescents are a blast. A lot of them might keep you for a season, as you personally know them and their parents. Then, they start doing funky stuff online, posting semi-lewd photos, wild party stuff, and demonstrating a nasty streak they obviously hide from their parents, and soon drop you, lest their misbehavior be unveiled to surprised mom and dad.

Pragmatically, it means a few less wedding presents to send. If you know what I mean.

Google Adsense — not

This is not google bashing. I do not believe in bashing. It is simply sound advice, I hate to see people wasting their time.

Years ago, all types of webinars, seminars, books, websites appeared, selling the fantsay that one could become wealthy instantaneously with Google Adsense programs. As a result, hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of sites, blogs, portals, fake-search engines sprung all over the internet, with the sole purpose of driving traffic and earning the big bucks. People “learned” how to make sites that drove high paying ads, where to best position them, all taught by self styled pundits of the hour.

For all intents and purposes, the Adsense program is not a bad thing, understand me. It might help you break even publishing a site. But that might be the extent of it.

Sure the big guns make tons of money with Adsense. However, the throngs of folk avid for a piece of the action, who spend hundreds, if not thousands of dollars buying the secrets of self styled “insiders”, are making ever less.

Here is the reality. Trust me. To be making a reasonable amount of money from adsense, you have to have hundreds of thousands of pages on your site. Meaning, if you have such a site, you might need your own costly servers. Meaning, this is going to cost you a lot of dough. In the best case scenario, you have to work full-time on the site, adding content for more than 12 hours a day, 7 days a week. Either that, or add the thousands of man hours, also costly. Except if you run one of those stupid fake-search engines, or content stealing sites driven by robots that I mentioned, which supposedly google does not like, but they seem to linger about for a long time.

For the vast majority, google adsense revenue is dwindling by the hour. Why is that so, I don`t know. When I first started, about 6 years ago,  I used to make more than 300 bucks a month, with about 1/5 of the pages my sites have now. Thus, I expanded my publishable pages base five fold, yet, now I make a little over 100 dollars EVERY THREE MONTHS!

I thought by now I would be making at least 2 grand.

That is a bit odd, for as any advertiser will tell you, the cost of advertising in google HAS NOT come down. Quite the opposite, good keywords cost an arm and a leg, in fact, a lot of them make no commercial sense whatsoever.

However, remember that a lot of the ads that are served through adsense are anything but  interesting to users. Sure, some are right on the subject of the page, others have nothing whatsoever to do with he content, and some of them are served in a different language than the site’s!!! No wonder no one clicks on the ads.

Thus, even if I write about stuff that should bring in high paying keywords, there is no certainty high paying ads will appear. Do not waste your time to find out how much of a commission you receive. Or how come you have hundreds of thousands of visitors to pages with published ads, yet, the number of ad impressions on the adsense admin area never comes close to that number.  Six years down the line, I have yet to discover this, and basically, have given up.

My advice to you is this. If you want to do a blog, a site, a portal whatever, by all means, so so. If you think Adsense revenue will make you wealthy, think again, in spite of what the webinars and pundits they you. Remember, all they want is to sell you a dream. These dream sellers also sold you the dream that you could buy five houses on stated income, and flip them in six months. Same folks, remember them?