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Udderly fascinating...nevermind, I'm kidding I didn't read 10% of it.The math doesn't add up for VS' claim that 93.8 million active users are using their websites. That means on average 78,166.66666667 active users each month on every website. Doable but not likely happening given the trends in how websites tend drop active members after awhile. And further analysis shows this means more than 2600 users active on average every day for the average 30 day month. That's alot of users per day on any site. This is why the sites are trying give little cognitive prizes like awards for posting 200 in month whatever it gives people goals and actually engages them like Casino Games. Yet, since this is website designed for interaction with other people these rewards are lost if the website doesn't have the members for the feed back necessary to engage the users properly. So that is a must if you want to keep and grow numbers.
But also must now consider this in the real world users don't neccessarily nicely average out their time on websites. instead they move around and they don't necessarily spend alot of time per week. So, you might have some really low performing messageboards in your portfilo like say Snow Plow forum which from a quick glance has 7.3K members. And is riddled with one and done posters. So, are you telling me that the other websites are so vastly over producing members they can make up for probably a good 120-200 of these stingers in the Portfilo?
The answer is simple you change the crateria of active member to include more people and then sure these numbers make sense but they tend overstate membership many critical ways. This is why so many ad studies are showing the ineffectiveness of online advertising like banners or pop-ups. Many studies show that even TV commercials are loosing their effectiveness to a large degree becuase of over saturation. Which is why Influencers are taking on such importance in the advertising world. Influencers are living commercials selling not a specific product but sense of what Happiness , Wealth, Beauty, ect and so on is.
The question is will VS start selling the Snowplowing lifestyle to the world via influencers.
Then we have the question of what exactly is E-Commerce to a website that sells ad space between membership created content? This is a bit of an interesting statement on the stock report for the Q3. What exactly is the E-Commerce? Are VS selling NFT's? I don't see any yet. Are they selling Memberships yes but I doubt many people are signing up for memberships at $20 per site for many sites. If you did 3 sites per year that would $60.00 USD just to get what maybe a special gold star and VIP chatroom. Well, if you're the only idoit to purchase one on a dead website that would be pointless now wouldn't it? Sorta of like talking to yourself. So what could this E-Commerce be? I think they trying to sell their platform as a market place thus they are counting the amount ads that generated direct purchases of items. So, then you start to see an interesting thing that the Ads went up 27% but the sales went down 27% in Ecommerce. So, what happened was most likely VS increased their per ad price to offset the fact that people stopped purchasing items after clicking on ads on their websites.
But there has always been a problem with the claims of views by internet companies and reality. Netflix was guardng its viewership data and methodology completely from the prying eyes of the external world until this year actually. Now they claim that will provide the data all the time. We will see.
Youtube has revised its algorthrim for viewership mutliple times and it still is probably overcounting very popular content creators because that helps to drive the entire system.
So, forgive me if I am bit skeptical of these huge numbers given how data is manipulated in Silicon Valley.
