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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http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3ASearch&search=al+gore+earth+in+the+balance+earth+can+only+sustain+10%25+of+current+population&button=
The page “Al gore earth in the balance” does not exist. You can ask for it to be created, but . . . . .
Missing views were not from the Youtube stream.
Youtube shows 107,624 overall views.
The Youtube Channel Views for the 24 hour event: 6,043 channel views
source: http://www.youtube.com/climatereality
Note: Ustream interfaces with Facebook to stream live video to a Facebook page.
“24 Hours of Reality is live right now! Click the play button below to watch right here on Facebook.”
Facebook site: http://www.facebook.com/climatereality
Twitter was set-up to send text and a link to the Ustream but the AlGore tweets clearly say 8 million have watched worldwide and his website says Millions Watched — home page headline.
Twitter site: http://twitter.com/#!/ClimateReality
I don’t get it unless UStream feeds to Facebook don’t properly reflect total Facebook views.
There was absolutely no forewarning of El Gordo’s fun-fest anywhere in the British media; I learned about what has turned out to be a fiasco from WUWT.
I loved Josh’s cartoons and I also dipped into Big Al’s presentations. I actually saw, live (?) Ms. Whatshername’s much parodied comments!
I spent more time re-loading WUWT to see the cartoons than I ever did watching the emetic provoking program to which they referred.
After all the hype, what a disaster for Al Bore. “Catholics listen to Pope” “bears defecate in woods” etc etc.
There was a very surprising part of the Climate Reality Project, given the hype about how the Goreans were going to out the names/identities of those who the Goreans considered deniers.
That surprising part is that not once did I see any black helicopters in the middle of the night nor did I hear anybody mention any on the open blogs. : ) Gore’s black helicopter budget must have been really tight or it might be that black helicopter pilots are skeptics.
John
If anyone wants a different reality, mine is astonishingly still avaliable, and at a very reasonable price.
8.6 million? pfft. Once again, warmists do not understand that no matter how much they wish for grand numbers to appear, there is long paper trail of actual evidence to disprove their hypothetical claim. For once, the claim of ‘it’s worse than we thought’ is a truthful statement and ManBearPig weeps once again.
I am highly unimpressed with the amount of Al Gore viewers. 10% of people thought Elvis was still alive15 years after his death. Far less think ‘global warming’ is still alive.
Andy Revkin posted the experiences of one of Gore’s presenters, Katie Carpenter.
A succinct summary is- Epic Fail.
Some highlights of what she wrote-
http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/09/20/a-climate-reality-presenter-weighs-gore-project/#more-37555
“At the last minute, the producer stopped by to remind us that we were NOT to say anything at all political, remembering that the one bite that the FOX people would grab…”
“At any given time, the Web audience was hardly epic, despite the large number of visitors who checked in at least once during the show. Turned out we would have been pretty safe to speak freely, in our little cocoon of panelists and climate advocates.”
“As far as I can tell, this enormous undertaking – 24 hours of broadcast-quality television production for the Web, featuring luminaries from science and other realms – has had zero effect. It’s hard not to get a little depressed-“
@ur momisugly Charles the Moderator :
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
Sorry for not getting back to you sooner.
Initially, I located the Ustream feed through the climaterealityproject.org page.
If you didn’t already have a Ustream account you had to click an icon that directed you to
http://www.ustream.tv/login/connect?opener=
then once you registered it redirected you back to climaterealityproject.org
I’m not certain if it was possible to view the feed directly from Ustream, because as I mentioned,
it redirected you back to climatrealityproject.org.
Also, the Ustream feed was separate from the chat box. You could do one or the other or both.
I don’t know if that could be constituted as separate counts, just thought I’d mention that.
In addition, the page had a live counter. When I had arrived there had already been over million and half views, but during my time at that website, the counter only adjusted by a few hundred a minute.
You would think that more would have engaged in the chat area, but like i said, during my visit, the chat room was dead and a only a few horny drunk guys were commenting. seriously.
But even once I started chatting, the most active commentors only ranged between 3 to 10 at best. If there were 100’s a minute logging in or viewing, they weren’t participating or they didnt stay long enough to understand how the page worked.
My impression was people visited the website and soon there-after left.
Like I said, It was quite pathetic.
Dr. Curry posted the following on Climate Etc., the critiques are worth a read.
”
Nature News Blog has a post on comments from invited experts on the Gore-a-thon (including moi)
http://bit.ly/qDHZvA
Von Storch has some interesting comments
“
Let’s compare and contrast. If Algore actually did get around 8 million viewers worldwide for GoreFest as has been claimed, how does this compare to say, Fox News programming? Taking just the prime time shows of Sept 15th, Fox drew approximately 6 million viewers, each of which stayed for at least one hour and the audience numbers only apply to the US.
Sorry Al, by any reasonable metric, it was a huge fail!
I wouldn’t doubt the Cartoon Network had more viewers in three hours in just the US than you had all day worldwide.
Sad, really.
Nick Shaw sats- “I wouldn’t doubt the Cartoon Network had more viewers in three hours in just the US than you had all day worldwide.”
Interesting point. If they had simply looped the Futurama and South Park episodes on global warming, I probably would have watched each episode once. And, the audience would have walked away a lot less depressed…
Charles,
James Delingpole picked up a reference to your article.
Al Gore’s five loaves and two fishes
By James Delingpole
source: http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100106264/al-gores-five-loaves-and-two-fishes/
Note: I left a comment on a Gore related Huffington Post article. I guessing, given the number of times they used the “D” word, that the Climate Reality Project will not respond to an inquiry from anyone who doesn’t support the IPCC consensus. Maybe someone over at the Huffington Post can get an answer.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/09/15/al-gore-climate-change-clean-energy_n_964015.html?ref=mostpopular
Even if the actual numbers are 9 million viewers over 24 hours, that’s still peanuts. This event clearly demonstrates that ACC is dead. No one believes it anymore, no one cares, its over. The world has moved on.
This is also a foreshadowing of the upcoming summit in Durban. Oooh boy, Durban is not looking good right now. I can’t wait for it, I want to see who actually bothers to show up. I would not be surprised if Gore doesn’t go.
This ’24 hours’ thingy was a complete flop, but it also begs the question, what is wrong with New Zealand and Australia? Why are they stuck in 2009?
Well, the real question before us is “Did Heidi Cullen show any skin?”
hey Charles –
drudge just linked delingpole who links this article.
NJoY the traffic!
Well,
I was one of those who stopped in at the Gorefest for a few minutes in hour 19. I got tired of the panel there. I couldn’t believe some of those folks had the nerve to call themselves “scientists.” If those folks are the sort Mr. Gore always surrounded himself with all these years, no wonder he is such a fanatic. But, then, I guess the money’s a pretty good motivator as well.
The irony is that it was Mr. Gore who got me interested in the issue in the first place with his campaign years ago. I was more interested in another misuse of “science,” the gun control issue and the junk science used to promote firearm bans. Now I blog on Climate change “science” and news as well. I guess Mr. Gore didn’t count on so many of us really looking at the science itself instead of the hype..
The funny part is that WWUT funneled a lot of us believers in AGIAI (Al Gore is an Idiot) to the site. I for one tuned in for an HOUR. So of the 17k how many were there to make fun or to do “opposition research”?
Likely the Goracle had less than 10,000 people who were his target audience and even fewer were there to be converted.
Come, come. Your analysis is just inconvenient.
Maybe they’re counting TCP/IP packets? 😉
I am embarrased to say I can be counted as a viewer. Here’s the deal. This piece of Eco garbage showed on Current (Al Gore) TV here in the states. I recall that I was watching a particularly engaging program on that channel which caused be to fall into a deep sleep. When I awoke, I found myself about 45 mins into the Al Gore-athon. So, unfortunately, I am counted as a viewer.
Also unfortuntely, b/c the program was shown on television at least here in the States, the math you’ve done to calcualte the viewers is most likely inaccurate.
Sorry 🙁
Rob says:
September 22, 2011 at 9:12 am
===========
Thanks for the info, that could help to explain the numbers.
Was that a Ustream feed to Direct TV or Cable? What channel, I can’t find a listing and it wasn’t part of the Climate Reality Press Release?
Thanks for the help.
Ustream feeds Current TV (internet tv) and Current TV has channels on other providers:
Directv channel 358
Comcast channel 107
Time Warner Cable channels 103 NY and 142 LA
Dish Network channel 196
Verizon channel 192
AT&T U-verse channel 189
Search for “Climate Reality” on Current TV however states “Only On Current TV”:
http://current.com/search.htm?s=on&v=on&r=off&context=us-homepage&context_id=89860422&context_type=group&q=Climate+Reality&x=9&y=14
Related search result:
http://getsatisfaction.com/currentcom/topics/why_isnt_24_hours_of_reality_on_current_tv_on_sept_14_as_advertised
So they heavily advertised on Current TV which in Jan. had a subscriber base of about 58M. Could this account for the missing 8M views if the Ustream stats only relate to the website, youtube, and Facebook views?