'Lies, damn lies, and statistics'

The three types of lies, as characterized by Benjamin Disraeli.

I got to thinking of this memorable quotation yesterday when I happened on a webpage at BurrellesLuce featuring my Insecticide Chalk post of May 3, 2007.

BurrellesLuce is a company that provides, among other things, media monitoring — long story short, you pay them to find out what others are saying about you.

I found the link to BurrellesLuce while I was noodling around in my Sitemeter statistics pages.

When I clicked on the link I was taken to a page that, over a reproduction of my post, complete with internal links, read as follows:

Source: Bookofjoe

Audience: 87,960 ([provided by Nielsen/NetRatings]

Date: 05-03-2007

Headline: INSECT LINE DO NOT CROSS INSECT LINE DO NOT CROSS INSECT LINE DO NOT CROSS

....................

Under the above were a link to my post and a PDF file of the post as saved by BurrellesLuce (top).

What am I to make of this?

Because I must tell you that the number 87,960 is rather disconcerting to me, seeing as I thought I was still working my way up to 10,000 readers a day as has been the case since I hit 5,000 daily about 18 months ago.

If Sitemeter's that far off from what's actually going down, then maybe it's time to reassess my advertising-free policy, what with traffic that could provide some serious ka-ching hereabouts.

Now, maybe BurrellesLuce's number is the sum of all bookofjoe page views since the post appeared nine days ago (I'm writing this on May 12): I suppose that could be the case and the number is in the right ballpark.

Still, it's startling.