@Anthony: Isn’t looking for conclusions without data, or despite the data, a bit like “Iraq has weapons of mass destruction”?

That said, you do have a point. Even if all of the Google Trends data has a systematic error which means those news sites’ traffic figures are going up, it also means that Facebook and Twitter’s are rising even faster than the graphs show. That means people’s time spent would be shifting to social networking sites and away from news sites, though within a growing total audience.

I’d still like actual data to support that theory though.

I’m not so fussed by the old “Who do you know who’s ever been in the TV ratings?” chestnut. You only need a couple thousand people to get a reasonably representative sample. As this margin of error calculator shows, in Sydney’s population of 4 million, for instance, a sample of 3000 people gives you a MOE of 1.79 percentage points with standard 95% confidence.

That said, I’ve seen a radio presenter get upset by an audience drop of one percentage point between ratings surveys. No matter how much I or the head of audience research tried to convince him, he simply wouldn’t accept that it was probably statistical noise.

I’ve also seen this fall apart when people try to analyse demographic slices within this sample, forgetting that the MOE then relates not to the total sample and population sizes, but to the size of that individual slice of 26 to 30-year-old left-handed lesbians.

@yewenyi: I think there’s currently more theories about Rupert’s motives than atoms in the Sun.

just because newspaper web stat graphs are going up (or down for that matter), does not mean they’re changing at a rate commensurate with, well, with anything – be it changes in website viewing behaviour, nor a migration of eyeballs from paper to web.

jokes about employees checking their Facebook every 6.5 minutes might sound funny, but they have a basis in reality.

dammit we just need better numbers! and as pointed out on other comments, there’s those who have various cookie- &/or ad- &/or script-blocking in place, shared IPs & proxies, etc.

but then, how is this any different to the scattergun shambles that’s been “ratings” and “readership” numbers in old-media since year dot? i asked this question of all my friends on Facebook just a year ago: “Who’s ever taken part in an TV ratings survey?”. 1 couple nearly 10 years ago *blank stare*

See also in mUmBRELLA today, In The Punch vs National Times debate, the missing metric is personality.

@Paul: Hah! Yes, the stats provided by ninemsn showed who as the topmost line on the chart? ninemsn of course.

Still, my critics have been relatively gracious. I won’t pick on them too much.

@Duncan Riley: This was the first time I’d explored Google Trends for Websites, and since it uses a different methodology I genuinely believed I was seeing results caused by that difference in methodology.

Well, in a sense I was! Just not the way I’d imagined…

Of course as you know, Sir, every traffic analysis tool is an estimate based on various assumptions. Sometimes people choose a particular tool ‘cos the reports look prettier, or it’s marketed better, or the results are more flattering.

This website, for example, has had either 16,306 unique visitors this month, or 61,490 or 7,036 — depending on whether I prefer AWStats or analog or Google Analytics. What’s a boy to believe?

At worse case, use Alexa: I know they’re not particularly accurate, but it’s a good way to get long term trend data (which shows these sites being mostly flat) http://skitch.com/duncanriley/njfbc/news.com.au-site-info-from-alexa