More Chartjunk from TechCrunch
I generally don’t have much to say about TechCrunch. I read it pretty often to see where people are putting their attention (or at least what TechCrunch thinks is the case) since I’m not really in that audience — I don’t visit Facebook (let alone have a profile), I don’t Twitter, and I use my cell phone for making phone calls and the occasional (once a month?) text message. However, a recent post on TechCrunch ticked me off because of the way it plays with statistics. The post is here and it claims that GMail will catch Yahoo! Mail, in terms of unique visitors, sometime in 2010. In and of itself, such predictions are not a problem, the problem is the way this prediction was arrived at: current percentage growth rate from November 2006 to November 2007. That’s right, a single number over an arbitrary time period is used as the sole basis for the prediction, and I quote: “Yahoo showed 3.21% growth for the 12 months to November 2007 compared with Gmail’s 53.60%”. Even worse, this single statistic is used to create Chartjunk:
Why the 12-month time-period? Why not compare the growth since Gmail started? Or use projections from the same time-periods for each service, i.e., compare the first two years of Yahoo Mail to the first two years of Gmail? Or pretty much any kind of deeper analysis that takes more than 5 minutes of thought? Does anyone really think that Gmail will continue to grow over 50% every year for the next 3 years? Or that Yahoo! Mail will only grow a few percent every year for the next three years? What makes the past year so special?
Not to mention, does anyone really care? I think the real issue is how much money are the two companies making? And what about the OEM-like agreements that Google has been making, i.e., becoming the email service provider for universities, companies, etc.?
Ugh. I hate Chartjunk and the simplistic statistics that back them up.
