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On NatRad this morning, much crowing was done over this figure and the fact that it amounted to over 12GB of data transferred.

Yawn!

If you look at the composition of pages on the Treaty website you'll see that each page has dozens of elements, meaning that the actual number of page-views is likely to be as little as 60K-70K.

Take this a step further and assume that each visitor reads 3-4 pages and we can see that this amounts to around 20K user sessions.

Divide this by the 42 days (six weeks) since the website was launched and you'll see that those 2.7 million hits probably equate to around 1,500 page-views per day -- producing less than 500 user-sessions.

The last set of stats for this site I bothered posting show that even little old Aardvark scores nearly 10,000 page-views per day (over six times that of the treaty site). And, because the "daily" edition of Aardvark is just a single page, the average number of unique IPs (user-sessions) per day for this site is nearly ten times that enjoyed by the treaty.

To be honest, I would have expected that an *expensive* site like the Treaty with far broader appeal than Aardvark, would have produced much higher traffic levels than it has.

But the main point of all this number-crunching is to show that, once again, the spin-meisters are trying to dupe the public. It sounds so much better to claim a site has scored 2.7 million hits than to admit that it's probably received fewer than 20,000 visitors.

Now have your say Got something to say about today's column, or want to see what others think?  Visit The Forums While you're here, why not visit the Aardvark Hall of Shame and perhaps make your own nomination.

Given that nobody seems to have an authoritative figure for the cost of the treaty site (some say $100K, others claim much more when all the research and "checking" are included), it's obvious that the cost per visitor (to date) lies somewhere between $5 and $50.

Personally I think the site itself is a useful component of our local web -- but I don't take kindly to idiots misrepresenting the level of interest it has attracted. Why can't they just tell us the number of user-sessions it's generated -- are they simply too embarrassed?

The Pommes Beat Us Hands-Down
Telecom's busy telling us that they're really working hard to get NZ into broadband -- and indeed they have rolled it out to a very large percentage of NZ towns and cities.

So why is it that we're so far behind the UK in broadband uptake?

The latest info out of Britain indicates that 15% of UK homes have broadband -- producing about 4 million high-speed internet users.

To get the same kind of penetration here we'd need to have over 250,000 Kiwis with *real* broadband connections.

So what's wrong with us?

According to Telecom, they've done an outstanding job of rolling DSL out to towns and cities across the country so it can't be that broadband isn't available to the majority of the population, So why are Kiwis sticking with their dial-up connections in droves?

Could it be high prices resulting from a lack of competition?

N'uff said.

Lighten Up
Yes, it's time for some fun and levity to finish the week.

If you're a fan of the special effects that were first seen in The Matrix and have since become a key part of the "action movie" genre then this is for you!

An eagle-eyed reader spotted this news item. That looks suspiciously like a well-known brand of Kiwi-made beer doesn't it?

Keep em coming!

If you feel that this is a good thing and/or you hold a "geniune affection" for yours truly -- then you are welcome to gift me some money using the buttons provided. In gifting this money you accept that no goods, service or other consideration is offered, provided, accepted or anticipated in return. Just click on the button to gift whatever you can afford. NOTE: PayPal bills in US dollars so don't accidentally gift more than what you were intending :-)

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