Transparency in numbers

This morning I was having a nice chat with Ryan Olson a write with the Red Herring. One of the topics we were chating about is what do wall these numbers really mean?

• page views
• visitors
• unique visitors
• concurrent users
• peak concurrent
• registered users
• active users
• paying users And more important than their meaning or definition how about all of the social networks, virtual worlds and online games publish these numbers transparently?

Well, it is not going to happen unless it is in the financial interest of the company running the service, so how could it be in their interest?

• Advertisers typically need to know these numbers to accurately price the ad products
• Press need these numbers for their stories to have more truth value
• B2B connections need these numbers to effectively construct business partnerships None of these three above are directly the end user and that reinforces the idea that it will be a while before end users get these numbers directly.

I think the most promising impetus will be ID/PW peering or sharing across networks of userbases and secondarily the press could begin to refuse to print stories unless they have specific pieces of information.

It will be interesting to see what in the end motivates the eventual transparency.

-Erik <div

Originally posted on LiveJournal