Datasheet

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Part I Laying the Foundation
TABLE 1-4
Commercial Web Sites
Site URL
Australian Bush Flower Essences www.ausflowers.com.au
Gibson Research Corporation grc.com
Jagex Software jagex.com
Janes Information Group www.janes.com
Magix Entertainment Software www.magix.net
Ptaah www.ptaah.com/home.html
Staples Office Supplies staples.com
The History Channel www.historychannel.com/ontv/index.html
TV Guide tvguide.com
The same is true, however, of even less obviously suspect figures. News stories are, unfortunately,
one of the least reliable of all statistical sources, because they are generally written in a hurry by
people who do not really understand statistics. They also often fall prey to the fault of accepting
statistics from yet other news stories. This can easily lead to the kind of situation where
one reporter gets something wrong, but the story is published in a major publication. Because
another reporter believes that anything in The Wall Street Journal or The New York Times must be
true, the figure is incorporated into yet another article, which is taken as gospel by someone else,
creating a chain that perpetuates a number that is far removed from its original source.
We’d be inclined to trust (without more than a reflexive professional doubt) a report from compa-
nies such as comScore (see Figure 1-11), Nielsen, or WebSideStory, all of which are professional
outfits that have proved reliable in the past.
Table 1-5 lists the URLs of some of the top Internet research firms.
You can never really trust any statistics, no matter what the source, unless you know how those
figures were arrived at — not if you’re going to bet your future on them. Any reputable research
company is glad to provide you with the details of the methodology they used in arriving at
certain figures.
Neither the numbers nor the methodology is necessarily free. Most of these companies
do issue some public reports, but they make their livings conducting custom research
projects or selling the results of their own initiated studies. Often, the publicly released figures are
only the tip of the iceberg. You can sometimes cut down on the cost of conducting a study by
participating in an
omnibus study , in which a group of companies each pay part of the costs, while
all share in the results.
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