by charles the moderator
[updated to correct usage of the words rank and reach. The correct graphs were used originally, but I used the wrong word to describe them]
Al Gore’s Climate Reality Project claims 8.6 million views of their presentations during their “24 hours of reality”. Let’s examine that claim.
On Facebook, they had around 66,000 people “accepting” the invitation to attend.
Let’s look at the Alexa stats for traffic rank reach on that day and compare it to a site we have access to more detailed information.
Eyeballing, it appears that on 9/15/2011, climaterealityproject.org had between 5 and 6 times as much traffic as wattsupwiththat.com.
Let’s convert Alexa’s traffic rank reach to numbers of people.
On 9/15/2011 according to quantcast, wattupwiththat.com had 27.9 thousand global visitors. Unfortunately, the climaterealityproject.org doesn’t show up in quantcast, for 9/15/2011, so we will have to estimate.
Being generous with the Alexa rank reach ratio between sites, let’s multiply 27.9 thousand times 6, which gives us about 167,000 global visitors for Al Gore’s big party on 9/15/2001
Now going back to Alexa, here is the fun statistic.
The average time on site for climaterealityproject.org is about 3 minutes on 9/15/2011. So for everyone who stayed for an hour there were maybe 30 or so who left after a minute which is normal for boring video. The distribution can vary, maybe some stayed for for 5 minutes or 10, but it doesn’t look good.
Let’s be generous with this as well and say that 1 in 10 stayed around to watch a significant amount of the program. That means there may have been about 17,000 dedicated viewers (estimating on the high side) of the program worldwide.
Now, maybe I’m totally wrong, maybe the Facebook application put this presentation in peoples’ newsfeeds and they watched inside of Facebook. I didn’t install the Facebook ap so I don’t know if it did that. Can anyone confirm? Maybe it showed up in Facebook friends’ newsfeeds and that was enough for Gore and company to call it a view, even if it was never played.
Maybe all the users took the alternate path of going directly to Ustream.
Or maybe, just maybe, there’s a little bit of storytelling going on and perhaps the numbers are a wee bit inflated.
Depends on your reality I guess.
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Don’t tell me that Al of Gore would make something up? Or exaggerate? /sarc.
Some more made up bulldust from the Warmists it would seem!
However, – using their own figures – and call it 9 million for ease – and ignore the fact that probably half were just curious and maybe some were fanatical repeat visitors/viewers!
according to http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm
the internet population is 2.1 billion.
this means that 9million out of 2.1 billion people are ‘interested ‘ in AGW.
This is around 0.43% of those with internet access.
Hardly demonstrative of a worldwide ‘fear’ or ‘concern’ is it?
Reply: You just reminded me of this, which I forgot to include in the article above. ~ ctm
uhh..does this mean that as WUWT carried more Gore, length of stay here decreased ?
I wouldn’t be surprised at that .. Al is terrible, even once-removed.
.that should be “once-removed”
I just used the Ustream method.
I plugged in and became the token shill for about 3 hours.
The video stream kept repeating itself.
Maybe some of the segments were live, but they continued to show the same feeds over and over.
Quite pathetic actually.
I even used the online chat.
When I showed up, which was about 4-6 hours into the project, it was mostly drunken jibberish and guys talking about girls.
Not any different than any other chat room.
It had to have been my presence that forced some of the alarmists out of bed, because after about a half hour of me in that chat room, that the rooms started to fill up with sober respondents and the name calling, ad -hominum, and jeering began to take its toll on me.
If this project was suppose to train the alarmist to win a conversation, then the project was a complete failure.
Anyone that stuck around while I was around, would have been embarassed for these fools.
That will be several hours of my life I will never get back.
Reply: Question–did you get to the Ustream via the climaterealityproject.org page, thereby counting as a short term visitor, or was there a way that bypassed the stats I used? ~ ctm
How many of us skeptics stopped by to have a look and almost puked after 20 seconds and left.
Shouldn’t at least one of those graphs be a hockey stick? Don’t bristlecone pines have internet?
I DO NOT HAVE A WEB SITE FOR WHICH I DO NOT HAVE MONEY. If AL GORE IS HAVING 8.5 MILLION VIEWERS IN FACE BOOK, WHY THE SURVEY OF CHIMALAYA.COM DECREASED HIS POINTS? HE HAD 14 points & I had 13. India had 17 points out of that mine is 13.
During 2010 , for 45 days I had 92.86% with out Twitter Account. Wecome to visit in Google search Engine: “Raveendran Narayanan” “Climate Change”
I got pretty much the same results. Alexa seems to disagree even with the basic Gore figure. On Sept 15th, my blog got 4,679 unique IP visitors in 24 hours,
http://sitemeter.com/?a=s&s=s24lumidek&r=6
Alexa translates it to 0.0013% of the Internet traffic. Gore got 0.04% of the Internet traffic on its peak day which is 30 times more than The Reference Frame. 30 times 4679 is about 130,000 unique visitors to the Climate Reality Project website on the very Climate Parody Day. So he either counted each unique visitor about 50 times or the whole figure is fabricated.
I agree it’s almost implausible that more than 20,000 people in the world were watching the boring show for more than a few minutes. Actually, most of the people who spent some research by watching this stuff were people like us, skeptics who view it as a professional duty of a sort.
Because both alarmists and skeptics agreed that this Gore event would harm the climate alarmism case, the event was promoted on skeptical blogs like ours – because we wanted its impact to be larger 🙂 – while the alarmist blogs remained nearly silent about it because they wanted to minimize the impact. This basic maths is totally obvious.
Reply: In the Alexa graph I used, climaterealityproject.org looks like it hit just above 0.05% for that day. These are all rough estimates, especially when trying to estimate the numbers of people who actually watched something for awhile as opposed to bounced, but yes, our numbers match quite nicely. It also roughly matches the numbers from the Facebook event. 66,000 may click on “I will attend”, but you’d be lucky to get 25% of that group to sit and watch for more than a minute. ~ ctm
Apart from popping in to see Josh’s cartoons I even stayed away from WUWT for Gorefest11. You cannot have too little of Al Gore. If they made AlGore toilet paper I would buy it.
I suppose the point of the whole thing would be to persuade non-believers, so the believers would feel no need to watch it. So there were probably more who wanted others to watch than who actually watched themselves.
One follower of the true faith is worth 50 Deniers
/Al G
Me says:
September 20, 2011 at 1:09 am (Edit)
How many of us skeptics stopped by to have a look and almost puked after 20 seconds and left.
————————-
I was one of those. Mind you the video was pretty crappy too.
How many of us skeptics had a look at climate reality project?
Not this one. I did enjoy the cartoons by Josh though, right here on WUWT.
If not for WUWT I would not have heard about it. I did not click any links further – seemed pointless. Josh’s cartoons were good though.
“Me says:
September 20, 2011 at 1:09 am (Edit)
How many of us skeptics stopped by to have a look and almost puked after 20 seconds and left. ”
I confess, I confess. But all I was guilty of was rubbernecking. You know, that urge to look at a traffic accident as you pass by.
‘Scuse me sitting here looking smug, but I decided that even one extra hit on Gore’s site would boost its credibility more than I was prepared to allow, so I didn’t go near it. Nominations for my sainthood to Anthony, c/o the Vatican 🙂
Or, as his masseuse put it, “Is that it?”
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
The first graphic shows “Reach” but is labeled “Traffic Rank”.
More telling is the Traffic Rank graph for six months. It’ll look even funnier in a couple months to see that one spike and then fading away to nothingness … while WUWT holds steady … month after month, like the Energizer Bunny®
There are still some tickets available! You’ll need a thick wallet, but what price is too steep for reality in person?
http://halltickets.org/ResultsTicket.aspx?evtid=1708018&event=Al+Gore&ppcsrc=8086610439&nid=1&eid=QS3&egid=A
Even though I thought Obama would be good for the US (And by default the world), it seems not to be the case. US politics seems to be more plastic than I thought!
I got to the videos via the CRP site. If all the video watching was through Ustream, would any of it show up as long term visit to CRP? I think I saw them embedded in a CRP page. Even then, if I’m not actively using the site, web monitors could conclude I had moved on to more interesting sites or had gone to bed, which was a more interesting site anyway no matter who or what I shared it with.
Maggie Fox didn’t go into details about where she got her figures. Probably the most interesting would be from Ustream, but I doubt they’re talking.
Did you really count this hits, or model it?
“How many of us skeptics stopped by to have a look and almost puked after 20 seconds and left”
Guilty as charged. Although the opening commercial was, what, at least 30 seconds, maybe more. If this part counts in the metrics, actual program watching would be much less. Personally it was all I could do to continue eating breakfast while watching “denier” feces hitting a spinning fan. If that’s the way Al Gory addresses the very people he is trying to convince, what can I say. I’m searching for terms here – intellectually bankrupt? Yes. Reptile-brained? Yes. Utterly without redeeming social value? Yup. The last gasp from a rapidly-purtifying meme (Al or AGW – not sure which)? Hopefully.
Geez, just realized that AGW also stands for Al Gore Wrecks (or pick your own ad-hominum W word)
Why does he still get air time and page space? Continuing to give the Goracle a podium is like beating a dead horse. He’s irrelevant. Watching Gore and his diminishing flock prattle on is like watching newsreels of the Hindenburg go down in flames over and over and over again. Seriously. Check it out here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F54rqDh2mWA
I think it’s just morbid curiosity for most people at this point.
I watched on and off for a couple of hours and logged on again for Al’s conclusion. My contribution probably accounted for 10 visits. I do think many went directly through Ustream as the climate project site did not work for me. So to be fair, you probably should not just tally climate project site numbers for that reason and others (facebook, etc.) you noted above.