Artists Shan Carter and Amanda Cox created the interactive chart in the video I’ve embedded below. (Added later: There is now a permanent spot for the graphic on NYTimes.com: here.) It is appearing this afternoon on the front page of NYTimes.com and interprets exit polling data from the entire Democratic Party presidential primary campaign. My video is a quick screencast (a video screengrab) of me clicking through the tabs of data that are displayed in the graphic. (What I didn’t show was how a cursor-hover reveals data related to each state box.) I believe it’s an impressive (dazzling) use of subtle interactive-animation and information design that effectively translates a mountain of incomprehensible data into an understandable statistical narrative. I’m especially struck by the way the NYTimes artists eschewed colors and relied on the animation and the relative placement of data to interpret the statistics. For a chart junkie (I confess), I’m impressed that it is strongly visual, yet at the same time, is very “un” info-graphic. This is serious information design porn, in other words. (For future readers, today is the last day of the marathon 2008 Democratic Party presidential primary campaign.)

Credits that appeared with the graphic: Source: Edison/Mitofsky exit poll Design: Shan Carter and Amanda Cox

Friday Afternoon Pondering: Minonline.com is the source of the chart above that ranks the top performing publications (as measured by the number of pages of advertising) during the past quarter in the business-to-business vertical of marketing. Minonline.com distributed a link to the chart as a teaser for its subscription-based service in which on Monday, I presume, the chart will be interpreted. At the link above, it merely states: “Crain’s Advertising Age shows its strength as the #1 publication on top of the advertising pages list for the 1st quarter. A less likely occupant is ST Media Group’s Signs of the Times with a first-quarter 2008, year-on-year 10% increase in ad pages and a nearly 40% increase for March 2008.”

Note: This is not the Signs of the Times magazine referred to, rather this publication about the sign industry is.

I’m not sure I trust the B2B media pundits to interpret this chart, however. I think it is a job for the guys at the Freakonomics Blog. How can advertising for advertising be so dramatically up in a quarter when advertising is supposed to be down — especially advertising in, of all media,B2B print publications.

I can guess the theories: (A) Media companies are advertising aggressively because they have so much unsold inventory, (B) media companies are launching new properties and thus are buying more ads to promote them, (C) media companies are aggressively pushing the message that advertising in a recession is the mark of a savvy marketer, (D) none of the above, (E) all of the above.

I’m guessing (doing anything else would require actual research and thought on my part) D & E are both correct answers. But again, I think it will take a skeptical economist to figure this out, not some analyst focusing on a narrow band of data related to the number of advertising pages sold.

I guess it’s theme week. And this week’s theme is all about magazines and the web.

Yesterday, I pointed to an interview with the business editor of Wired magazine regarding magazines and the web. Today, the Wall Street Journal has an article on the same topic, focusing primarily on the web strategy of Wired’s parent company, Conde Nast.

Quote:

“Web revenue for magazine companies is about 5% of their total revenue, says Martin Walker, chairman of Walker Communications, a magazine-consulting company. “While [online ad revenue] is growing quickly, it is not replacing lost print revenue,” he says. “None of them can compete on the Web in terms of traffic.”

While I’m sure Mr. Walker knows what he’s talking about, I sometimes think I’ve heard that statement said so many times by so many magazine industry people that it — to me, at least — has risen to the level of a tenant of faith — or an accepted myth. Again, I’m not singling out Mr. Walker — most of the people I know in the magazine world would say the same thing: Revenues from online operations are growing fast, but can only, ever be a fraction of lost print revenues because, well, magazines websites will never be able to compete on the Web for traffic (which translated, means: “with Google”).

I’ll skip the whole economics of the two different business models — economics that include the overhead of marketing, production and distribution in magazines — that make a mere comparison of top-line revenues irrelevant.

I’ll go ahead and jump to my challenge of the core belief represented in the quote: “None of them can compete on the Web in terms of traffic.” I don’t understand that theory. What does it mean, exactly? Who can Conde Nast not compete with in terms of traffic? (Again, those are rhetorical questions: The implied message is that magazine companies can never compete with Google for traffic.)

I believe a more important question to ask is this: Is traffic the the only — or the universally definitive — competitive metric of the web? Will traffic always be the metric used by advertisers to determine where they should invest their marketing dollars? Obviously, if I sell widgets online and search engines deliver me customers who are in the process of buying widgets, I’d place an extremely high value on the traffic metric. But what happens if (or, when) advertisers who aren’t driving online transactions decide “time spent” on a website is a more critical measure of engagement than unique users or pageviews? Or what about when they realize that massively-traffic’d web services and applications that are utilities and tools, rather than media one experiences — or engages with — are perhaps not the right environment for brand-building marketing?

Or what if some types of advertisers (i.e., consumer brands that aren’t using the web to drive online transactions, but to support a brand) realize that a better means of determining where to advertise is something like the Techmeme Leaderboard that ranks which websites tech-niche bloggers are pointing to. Can magazine companies compete for a top spot there? Well, one could easily dominate it if it they purchased a few properties like TechCrunch. But even today, there are plenty of print-centric brands represented on the list. Moreover, once you move outside the world of technology news, I’m sure one would find that the “leaderboards” of online media are already print-centric brands. Want one example? Here is the leaderboard for a sister “memetracker” of Techmeme, the politically-focused Memeorandum. Do print-centric brands compete there? Answer: They dominate it. (Hypothetical question: If a leaderboard of food bloggers existed, where would Epicurious rank?)

Obviously and without a doubt, Conde Nast will never compete with Google in terms of traffic. But is utility-oriented traffic what a Conde Nast’s goal should be? Google is a search engine. People use it to find what they are looking for. If Conde Nast’s web properties are what the searcher then clicks to — and engages with and blogs about and develops conversations and relationships around, isn’t that “engagement” what brand marketers want?

In the end, raw traffic will be the competitive metric of search-oriented advertising — a massive and powerful new form of advertising that leads directly to decisions and transactions. However, another form of online advertising that’s focused on brand-building and lifestyle-association will gravitate to those places on the web where people engage in their passions and loves.

And that’s an arena where magazine companies should be able to compete rather forcefully if the people who run them would get over believing in the myth that such a competition is over.

After a couple of decades of reading countless stories related to holiday sales, I can say one thing for certain: Retailers never, ever, predict they’re going to have a great holiday sales season. I’m not sure why — underpromising, I suppose — but every year I read the same teeth-gnashing stories: Holiday sales are not expected to grow significantly from the previous year.

And then, if they do see a spike in sales early on, retailers and retail analysts talk it down. Are they afraid that if we think sales are strong, we’ll not be stirred to do our patriotic duty — that we won’t drop what we’re doing to head out and buy more stuff — for the good of the country?

For example, the New York Times is reporting “that sales rose by 8.3 percent on Friday compared with last year’s day after Thanksgiving.”

That’s good, right? Apparently not. Because, according to the reporter, shoppers did not “splurge” this year. They spent only $348 each during the holiday weekend, which is down from $360 each last year.

Never mind the two statistics are not actually connected in any way except that the reporter did a mash-up of two different surveys from two different sources to come up with a creative interpretation. In the first survey, sales were up 8.3% on one day. In the second survey, per-shopper purchases were down over an entire weekend. By combining the two unrelated surveys, the reporter suggests that more people are shopping, but spending less — and then leaps to the conclusion that can only be characterized as something so obvious as to be amusing: People are looking for bargains. (Unlike, I guess, they did in the past.)

I’ve decided holiday shopping stories are about as helpful as articles appearing in the sports section during the two weeks before the Super Bowl. Lots of analyses that fill airtime and column inches, but that mean nothing.

So as a public service — so you can skip all the stories about retail over the next month — here’s all the news you’ll need:

1. People are going to spend more money this holiday season than they did last year.

2. They’re going to increase their spending by roughly whatever the growth of the economy was last year.

3. They’re going to spend more money online than they did last year. (That has nothing to do with the price of gasoline. It has to do with the fact that more people like me (those who hate to go shopping) are discovering the joy of shop-clicking.)

4. Retailers are going to slash prices earlier and more deeply than last year. (Except you’ll have no way to prove it unless you kept meticulous records of what each retailer did last year.)

5. There will be some item — a toy or gadget — that sells out and is going to is being auctioned for a ridiculous amount on eBay. (Sub-prediction: It won’t be the Kindle despite Amazon selling out its first batch.)

6. Flatscreen TVs and HD DVDs are going to do really well. (At my house.)

7. The hipster-tech gift of the season will be the One Laptop Per Child’s XO, which has extended its Give One, Get One program through December 31. (Despite the WSJ doing a number on it Saturday.)

8. Apple will sell lots of Macs and iPods and iPhones. (And on January 15, when Steve Jobs announces new stuff, people will regret they didn’t wait.)

9. The increase over the previous year in news coverage of holiday-retail sales will grow faster than the GDP.

10. Baby Jesus will grow between 2-3% more disgusted with how the annual commemoration of his birth has become tied to retail sales figures.

Longtime readers of this blog know I’m amused when my RSS newsreader stacks links to coverage of the same news that have headlines and ledes that seem contradictory:

New York Times: “Inflation Was Tame in October”

Lede: “Inflation remains contained despite high oil prices and a record low dollar, a government report showed today, offering some reassurance to the Federal Reserve as it considers lowering interest rates at its next meeting.

AP: “Consumer Prices Up 0.3 Percent”

Lede: “Consumer inflation posted another elevated reading in October as energy prices shot up by the fastest pace in five months.”

A ‘rock stars die young’ meme is blanketing the web this morning. As the findings of the survey sound astoundingly obvious, I predict they will be proven wrong. Frankly, anyone who has ever watched an episode of VH-1’s Behind the Music could have come up with the same findings.

However, here’s one obvious flaw in the coverage of the research: many of the news organizations covering it, like the BBC’s linked above, have headlines like, “Why rock and roll stars die young” and the crux of the stories is this: rock stars live fast and die young. However, the story reports that the research reveals drug and alcohol problems accounted for one in four deaths: or, with my emphasis: ONLY one in four deaths. (If you watch Behind the Music, you would estimate that four-in-four such deaths are alcohol or drug-related!) In reality (as opposed to Behind the Music conventional wisdom), to determine whether or not “a fast lifestyle” is the reason for rock star deaths, one would have to compare such statistics to the causes of deaths in other groups of non-rock stars who share all other characteristics, especially age. If, for example, a group of non-rock stars the same age die at the same rates from alcohol or drug-related reasons, then it invalidates the “live fast” basis underlying the BBC story’s lede.

More problematic is the lack of any questioning by reporters regarding the foundation of this research. How were the 1,050 U.S. and European “rock stars” selected to be in the research group? The findings of this study could be heavily influenced by how that selection process was carried out. Perhaps there is a legitimate measure of “rock stardom” — (cumulative record sales by month x of an artists’ commercial career?) — but if anywhere along the process, a group of “experts” decided who the pool of “rock stars” are, then the research is suspect. Why? Because the rock star status of some artists often inflates after a premature death. If the basis for inclusion in such a list of “rock stars” is based on criteria other than that which can be quantified at a specific point in an artists’ career — before death — then it could skew the sample in a way that could potentially cause it to have an inflated number of “dead” rock stars.

Related (somewhat): Well, it’s related because it’s about how reporters cover statistics. This article in the NY Times about an explosive increase in the number of children diagnosed with bipolar disorder, very clearly states that the research does not suggest more children have such disorders, rather that more doctors are using that diagnosis. It even carries the headline, “Bipolar Illness Soars as a Diagnosis for the Young.” Pretty clear, huh? Well, the Newser.com blurb that alerted me to the story says this: “Number of Bipolar Kids Skyrockets,” which is in some ways, the opposite of what the New York Times story says.

The other day, I posted a flip remark about the absurd media coverage that has turned Danah Boyd’s essay, “Viewing American class divisions through Facebook and MySpace” into tripe. I was specifically referring to those who were trying to translate her academic analysis into some type of marketing strategy lesson. Danah’s important research has been misunderstood by a wide array of people who obviously didn’t read it and who then found “experts” to comment on it who did not let the fact they had also not read it slow them down from interpreting what it meant.

Danah is pretty dumbfounded at the response her essay has received. Today, she posted a lengthy response to the critiques that includes the following:

“I find it really weird when people have said that I just devalued MySpace by saying that hegemonic kids are on Facebook. Some marketers are even using my essay to say that all advertising should be funneled to Facebook. Are marketers that stupid?

I think that was a rhetorical question, so I won’t answer it.

If BusinessWeek, Forbes or Fortune call about doing a glowing cover story on you and your company, well, suggest they feature your competition. Via Stephen Baker (who recalls writing a 1998 cover story for BW on Nokia that later rode its industry’s roller coaster up and down and up after that), here’s a study (PDF) that suggests companies that have either a negative or positive cover story later “regress towards the mean.” (Stephen is completing a book on math, so using terms like “regress towards the mean” comes natural for him.)

The “cover curse” is not limited to business magazines. Back in January of 2002, I pointed to this cover story of Sports Illustrated that explored its cover curse. As the history of that magazine’s cover-curse involves at least one person who died two-days after being featured on the cover, I’m sure her loved-ones would not be comforted by the notion that her death was just a small equation in a much-bigger regression model. However, I’m sure some actuary could crunch the numbers to predict what ones chances are for stepping in front of a bus right after appearing on the cover of a specific magazine.

Speaking of cover curses, around our house, we’re hoping there’s no truth to the Madden curse, as our favorite quarterback is gracing the cover of Madden NFL 2008.

I had not planned to continue with my thread of Saturday in which I invited people to send me data showing that people who are “young” get NO information from TV or magazines. However, serveral people have sent me links to data backing up my premise, like this, however, from the authoritative source on the subject — Maxim — that says 71% of men ages 18-34 spend more time online now than a year ago (as I said Saturday, don’t we all) but a resounding 74% still felt that putting an ad on TV would be the “most effective” way to get it seen by guys.

(Thanks, Wayne Smith)

I won’t review the history of my reporter-math peeves, however, I think one of the big (downward) turning-points in my hope for the future involved a news item years ago about a debate over the need for a statistics course in Northwestern’s Medill School’s curriculum. Subsequently, I was corrected by some of the players in the controversy who said I missed the point — that I characterized a j-school version of statistics as being “dumbed-down” when the point was that statistics for j-school students should be more focused and relevant. So, this time, I’ll characterize it as a positive and optimistic sign when I point to this post by Limor Peer about a new course at the Medill School called “News and Numbers”. I DO NOT think it is a “dumbed down” stats course for journalists. I think it is a good thing.

Quote:

“The course covered much the same ground as statistics courses offered in other university departments, but it was geared toward Medill students - students used relevant data (e.g., audience research, media content analysis) to understand statistical concepts and learned how these statistics can be a useful and essential part of journalism. They also learned what many of the numbers being used in public discourse mean, where they come from, how to interpret and evaluate them, and how to use them in their own writing.

The post contains a list of several texts and excellent links related to the topic.

Here are some fun reporter-math headlines from this morning, although this is more an example of a headline writer not understanding statistics than the reporter. Let’s just call them dueling headlines:

AP: Productivity falls in 1st quarter

Reuters: Q1 non-farm productivity rose 1.0 pct

So there you have it: Productivity either fell or rose during the first quarter.

Explanation: Obviously, whoever wrote the headline for the AP story doesn’t understand the difference in a slow-down in the rate of growth vs. a fall. Also, a downward revision of earlier estimates — that still is an increase in the rate of growth — is not a fall.

I must admit, using the headline question “Is 30 too old to start a company?” is a great way to generate comments and links. And, no doubt, in certain business niches — VC-backed online startups based in the Silicon Valley, campus-vicinity restaurants, youth fashion, pop music or anything related to pop-culture — the intuitive answer is yes.

However, the Vallywag folks are going to flunk “Freakonomics” if they attempt to prove anything statistically convincing with that chart accompanying the post. Valleywag writes, “a quick check on the great tech companies of the last three decades shows a pretty brutal rule. The most spectacular successes are launched by founders still in their twenties.” As I feel certain that reporters and bloggers will soon be quoting this “research” to prove something, I feel compelled to say, while fun and entertaining, the chart proves nothing. First, the list is said to be of “great tech companies of the last three decades” when it should be labeled “tech and online media companies we could think of that would prove our point that if you’re over 30, you are too old to start a company.” At least they admit their data was crunched by Valleywag, which is right up there with saying your data was crunched by The Onion.

In reality — or, as we say, the real world — successful companies (and failing ones) are started by teenagers and retirees and every age between. If one has a serious interest in this topic, I suggest reading the book The Origin and Evolution of New Businesses by Columbia B-School School professor Amar Bhide. First published in 1999 and based on data about Inc. 500 companies in 1989, the book is not a how-to or beach read. It is a serious attempt to explore the economics of starting and growing a successful business. Bottomline: The factors that go into business success are far-reaching and varied. Trying to peg success to one factor, like the age of the founder, is folly.

Heather, you know I am one of your biggest fans. When I talk about magazine writers who know how to use a blog with finesse, you are my go-to example. So please don’t take this personally. However, when you start playing with charts and graphs of Technorati data and start quoting Gartner analysts on your blog, I’m afraid you are using reporter-math to prop up an argument that the same data can disprove.

You write, “the data Sifry sent back seems to show that blogging growth is plateauing.” Actually, the data Sifry sent you doesn’t do that, but I’ll forgive you that “lede” as your post did include an admission that more data is necessary before drawing such a conclusion (although that’s buried in your post) and you did include (again, buried) the caveat there are others who suggest people may be “trying out other types of social media, including video, podcasts, and social networks” and that might effect the numbers.

I don’t have time now to explain my interpretation of the Technorati data, but will later, perhaps this weekend. However, in the meantime, I will point back to my three-year old post in which Paul Saffo explains macro-myopia. Secondly, the more important trend is “personal expression” platforms — not “blogging.” I could go on, but am walking into an all-day conference on, uh, the “economics of social media.”

I’m pleading guilty to inciting a rant. When I saw this Financial Times article in which the reporter, Joshua Chaffin, hung his story’s premise on statistics he chose to make up rather than look up, I knew I could do one of two things: repeat my typical rant about reporter math or just forward a link to the galaxy’s leading authority on the statistics the reporter dreamed up. And whoop, there it is. As Professor Husni is chairman of the journalism department at Ole Miss, I’m hoping his students are being inspired by his skills with a calculator.

Using scientific data, the comScore people have discovered that Firefox users all fly in private jets and look like models in Gap ads…and, oh yeah, their big brother can beat up your big brother.

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