MTP's David Gregory Does Journalism, Some Citizens Want His Arrest

Doing Data Journalism Badly

from the flop dept

Fri, Dec 28th 2012 4:32pm — Mike Masnick

While there was a lot of rhetoric concerning the Instagram terms of service mess recently, most observers of these kinds of things noted that for all the claims from people that they were "quitting" the service, few people ever actually follow through on such threats. So, it surprised some this morning when the NY Post reported that Instagram users actually did flee in large droves, citing data from a company called AppData. They argued that there was a potential 25% decline in users, which is huge. The news apparently contributed to Facebook's stock dropping by nearly 3%... despite the claim being almost entirely bogus.

Even a quick look at the data that AppData presented should have raised some eyebrows:

As lots of folks pointed out, starting with Zachary Seward at Quartz (linked above), the drop shown does not occur until December 24th... a good week after the whole controversy went down. Furthermore, AppData does not measure all Instagram usage at all, but the small subset of people who have connected their Instagram accounts to their Facebook accounts. But most people just use Instagram as a mobile app, and AppData doesn't measure that.

Meanwhile, Robin Wauters over at TheNextWeb does a brilliant job of showing plenty of other services that AppsData's "data" also shows "plunged" during the same time period, including Yahoo! Social bar, which shot up... and then back down:

Or Pinterest, which dropped a bunch during that same time period:

Wauters lists a bunch of other examples as well, all suggesting that maybe the original claim by AppData, repeated by the NY Post (and then others) had little basis in reality.

Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.

Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.

While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.

–The Techdirt Team

Filed Under: data, journalism
Companies: appdata, instagram, ny post

8 Comments

If you liked this post, you may also be interested in...

Reader Comments

Subscribe: RSS

View by: Time | Thread

This comment has been flagged by the community. Click here to show it

out_of_the_blue, 28 Dec 2012 @ 5:01pm

"Doing Data Journalism Badly" -- Yes, you are.
Oh, wait. You're apparently still under your own illusions.

Yes, you can rely on dolts to remain dolts no matter how obviously exploited by greedy corporations. "If you're not paying for the product, you are the product", and "products" aren't very bright. Just at the moment, I think they should be made into Soylent Green, but perhaps that will pass.

Take a moment for Mike "Streisand Effect" Masnick and click:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect
Actual unsolicited testimonial: "Until I read Techdirt.com, I didn't know what shameless self-promotion was!"
[ link to this | view in thread ]
average_joe (profile), 28 Dec 2012 @ 5:03pm

The news apparently contributed to Facebook's stock dropping by nearly 3%... despite the claim being almost entirely bogus.

I was wondering why it opened down like that. Buying opportunity and rally back to $26. Great day for $FB daytraders.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Chronno S. Trigger (profile), 28 Dec 2012 @ 5:49pm

The drop happened just before Christmas. Must be a coincidence.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Anonymous Coward, 28 Dec 2012 @ 6:00pm

mountain out of a molehill eh Mike
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Anonymous Coward, 28 Dec 2012 @ 6:19pm

Well, I wouldn't say this is all bad, it certainly points to one thing, all those people who say "I will quit" some probably do, this would make me interested in looking more deeply into it.

Say like trying to find a correlation between number of post saying "I quit", "I will leave", "I am cancelling" etc to drops in network activity, download of apps etc.

AppData may not be accurate enough to give exactly coordinates but it could be good enough to give a general direction.

Saying that I agree AppData may not be trustworthy enough to make claims about how many leave or to measure market share impact accurately, but it may be good enough to spot trends.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Anonymous Coward, 28 Dec 2012 @ 6:36pm

Re: "Doing Data Journalism Badly" -- Yes, you are.
Please return to reality, if you can still find your way back.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Dave Nelson, 28 Dec 2012 @ 7:01pm

Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics
I think old Sam had it right. Who knows what this actually means, or where they got their "numbers".
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Khaim (profile), 30 Dec 2012 @ 7:06am

Daily Active Users
It's so weird how many people stop using [arbitrary internet service] between December 24th and January 1st. Almost like there's a national holiday or something.
[ link to this | view in thread ]