Boy Genius Report posted this chart today as evidence that both the Kindle Fire and the Blackberry Playbook had “better” holiday sales than the iPad.
There’s so many things wrong with this chart that I hardly know where to begin. The numbers used in the chart are the % increase in web traffic, day to day. So this chart is saying that the kindle fire had 120% more web traffic on christmas morning then it did the day before, while the iPads number seems to be close to 0%.
The problem is that the kindle just came out, so its “growth” as a percentage would obviously be huge. An overly simplified example might make this even clearer. Lets say that on December 24th there 100 kindles surfing the web, while the iPad, which has been out for more than 2 years now, had 1,000,000 users browsing. If 100 people got a kindle for christmas that would lead to 100% growth, while Apple would have to sell 10,000 more ipads just to get 1% “growth”.
It reminds me of the “analytics” that Gruber talked about a lot over the holidays on Daring Fireball. In both these cases the authors of the reports deliberately distorted the information to mislead the readers. The difference is the John called them out on it while the Boy Genius Report went with the headline, “Web traffic patterns suggest Apple’s iPad was a dud this holiday season”
This is the worst kind of reporting. It makes me embarrassed to be a regular reader of the Boy Genius Report.
