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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Love the headline.
Australian Climate Change Minister even less popular than Gore. See the size of his audience!!
h/t yaossxx on Delingpole Blog
The interior of the Earth is also 2 million degrees…. Hello!!!!
It’s not as if the guy won’t say anything to further the cause!
“Al Gore’s big party on 9/15/2001”
Shouldn’t this be 9/15/2011?
Now comes the real test of Gore’s intellect. The world has rejected his message clearly. Can he turn away from a message he has lost, or at least re-examine his alarmism? That’s the tough one. He certainly knows that his work is seeing a non-linear decline in returns. He must face facts at some point, unless he’s completely isolated himself in a bubble and he’s not seeing the reality he thinks he’s professing.
Cwæþ Luboš Motl (September 20, 2011 at 1:21 am)
You’re forgetting that because of all the excitement, there were probably between 30 and 70 people crowded around each and every computer, mouths open, tears streaming down their cheeks. Those people count, don’t they?
“claims 8.6 million views”, interesting how they used views instead of unique visits.
Just a simple question guys,
How many Al Gore trained “The Climate Project” connectors do you have in areas of importance, such as business, politics, education ?
I’ll give you a hint to the depth of their penetration – UNFCCC Executive Secretary, Christiana Figueres, who chaired the last UNFCCC conference (COP16) in Cancun 2010 and will chair the next conference COP17 in Durban in South Africa, is a TCP connector, trained by Al Gore.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christiana_Figueres
Locate the Paragraph titled ‘Lectures’ and the last sentence in that paragraph.
In Australia, we have Al Gore trained TCP connectors (presenters of the A.I.T. message, notes, video) in business, unions, education, legal.
And that doesn’t touch on the ramifications of the ‘Inconvenient Youth’ – for teens as part of the Alliance for Climate Protection.
Now we have the Climate Reality Project. The Al gore website appears to have taken down The Climate Project, and it is now ‘under construction.’
The UStream info/stats page for the Climate Reality Project shows that there were 484,371 total unique views across all channels and videos. Not sure how the Gore Gang inflated that up to 8.6 million views but there you have it.
Does Al Gore’s CRAP project claim unique views, or does it count return visitors? If you get disconnected or timed out and reconnect, how many views does that count as?
Or did CRAP gather some data on views, adjust it, extrapolate it and then run it through a model to get 8.6 million views?
Many, many years ago my ISP sent me an urgent email advising me they were going to start charging extra for abusive users of their hosting service. I was aghast… abusive? Really? They claimed I had something like 50,000 hits in a week (this was in dialup days).
I got a copy of their records, and spent a bunch of time laughing. Each graphic, each access, they counted every single communication between a client and their server as a “hit”. For a typical page that would have been 20-50 “hits”. My actual number of visits was more like 1000, spread over a week, between several pages. Maybe, possibly 100-200 actual people. Not exactly an abusive user, right?
Oddly enough, I never heard from them again about the matter.
I wonder if that’s what we’re seeing here? Maybe they’d have to also bundle in all nameserver “hits” while they’re at it… and multiply by the number of google “hits” for their name… and add the Bing “hits” too, just in case.
Whatever the answer is, 8.9 million is complete and total fabrication. As little hope as I might have for the unwashed masses intellectual capacity, those few who care would have visited once, laughed, and left. I don’t know anyone who knew about the thing other than myself from WUWT.
Personally, I hold their claim as yet another example of how people in the AGW hysteria industry will outright lie to get attention. Even my acquaintances that are warmist believers are starting to realize their fears are being preyed upon purely for selfish reasons.
I tuned in 3 times to see if there was anything to be gained. I gained the knowledge that the priest’s acolytes were preaching to the choir. I saw nothing that was solid, nothing that challenged me to stop challenging the CAGW story. So I clicked off, mostly over to WUWT and Climate Depot to see if there was any live rebuttal going on.
So I am 3 of the many. But how many “unique” viewers? I was watching a program that had a character assert his importance by repeatedly claiming to have “72,000 unique viewers in 8 minutes!”. The “unique” status, though obvious, intrigued me. How many unique viewers would Gore have had? Or RealClimate, or WUWT for that matter?
Unique viewers are the ones that vote. Those are the numbers we need to understand. The movie character was able to determine it – he was on Facebook, I think. Are these numbers discernible?
@QuickieBurialAtSea You mean you invented some Gore remover? Gosh, I’d buy several quarts of it to rub on some folks I know just to get them to return to near-sanity. Once removed is a proper use of the expression when referring to Gore’s bs in a gullible person’s mind. Both spellings are proper.
A number of people here have said they visited the Goreathon. OK, joke about rubbernecking a car wreck is good, but think about it for a moment. Your visit, however brief and accompanied by giggling and vomiting noises, is another on the site counter, and is being used as such. The very fact WUWT has a piece on the numbers indicates their importance politically.
Please guys, don’t go there… the site counter doesn’t know you think Al Gore is a twerp.
I watched the last hour of Gorefest and the counter on the main CRP page was at 8.5 million then. That has to be where they’re getting that 8.6 million number.
But it was clear by the end of the first hour that the CRP counter only went up, never down. It was clearly counting every connection, including reconnections, not unique hits. And in the chat/feeds people were complaining like crazy about getting disconnected, at least during the first four hours.
I did not log onto the Climate Reality Project. And I loved every minute of not doing so. : )
John
No wonder the entire country is in a cold snap… the Gore Effect has gone viral.
I attended the 2pm PT session and the last session on the 16th and was gobstruck at how low the number of views were. At 3pm PT the site stated just less than 7M views, by the end at 5pm PT it was about 8.6M views. I found it very curious that 1.6M views occurred in the last 2 hours.
The part I find to be telling, 484,371 unique views related to 532,843 total views of the Ustream sessions. This means only 484,371 people actually took the time to view a session and, of the group that did, only 48,472 bothered to view more than once. Subtract the 24k hits before the webcast started and we’ve got a program that turned the audience completely Off.
If we look at the Total viewer hours for all shows; 16165 days, 21 hours, 28 minutes.
Days viewed (16165 ) in minutes = 1440 minutes x 16165 days = 23,277,600 minutes
Hours viewed (21) in minutes = (60 minutes x 21 hours) + 28 minutes = 1,288 minutes
(23,277,600 + 1,288) / 532,843 Total views = 43.69 minutes / view.
(23,277,600 + 1,288) / 484,371 Unique views = 48.6 minutes / view.
Unless the Ustream numbers are incorrect, 24 hours of Climate Reality with Al Gore turned away a majority of viewers within the first 50 minutes of viewing.
I don’t use Facebook or Twitter but found this which implies that the video was not streamed to Facebook.
“Starting a day before the event (Sept 13 Central Time) you grant us permission to post on your behalf. We will only post content relevant to 24 Hours of Reality and climate change, and we won’t post more than a few times an hour. You’ll still be able to tweet and use Facebook normally, and you can revoke our access anytime through your Facebook and Twitter settings. After September 15 (CT) we will stop posting any content on your Facebook or Twitter feed and you can revoke our access.”
source: http://storyballoon.org/blog/2011/09/05/climate-reality-project-facebook-twitter/
Good work Charles.
It’s worse than we thought…
@ur momisugly John form CA, @ur momisugly CTM: Wow, you numbers suggest that Climate Reality project was truly repulsive! 🙂
We can guess average time on site by subtracting the viewing time of the 17,000 (proposed by CTM) dedicated viewers. Figure a dedicated viewer watched 8 hours, 17,000 * 8 * 60 = 8,160,000 minutes for dedicated viewers. Subtract from 23,277,600 you get 15,117,600 minutes viewed by 467,371 (484,371-1700) casual viewers for an average time on site of 15,117,600 / 484,371 for 32.34 min on site.
That still seems high to me…I spent about that much time on the site and, being an optimist, I foolishly waited for the programming to get better – I can’t imagine many other people being that patient. 🙂
Whatever way you slice it, the 8m viewers seems like a wish statement.
“Me says:
September 20, 2011 at 1:09 am
How many of us skeptics stopped by to have a look and almost puked after 20 seconds and left.”
I thought about looking at the program, puked for 20 seconds, and turned off my computer. I think I had a better time than yourself.
chiefoptimist says:
September 20, 2011 at 11:42 am
That still seems high to me…I spent about that much time on the site and, being an optimist, I foolishly waited for the programming to get better – I can’t imagine many other people being that patient. 🙂
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I agree, an average of about 10-15 minutes is likely. The faithful likely left the program running while they slept 🙂
Since they used other peoples Twitter and Facebook accounts and posted to the accounts a few times an hour, the missing 8 or so million views are text related. Its pretty telling when you send 8 million posts over 11+ hours and still can not get people to view the program.
sample Tweets: http://twitter.com/#!/search/ClimateRealityProject
As I posted before
The live stats at 11pm (not sure what time zone)
8 moderators
15 viewers (logged on)
101 guests
I saw similar values every time I checked. If only about 120 people were watching at any given time then how is it possible to get 8 million hits? Obviously, one of the stats is wrong.
Robert Clemenzi says:
September 20, 2011 at 12:42 pm
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Al’s Climate Babble supposedly has 700k+ active members. If 100k have either a Twitter or Facebook account and allowed 4 posts/hour for 24 hours it would be 9,600,000 posts.