Useless numbers

[andrewducker]

According to the Match.Com dating advert I just saw, "Someone meets their Match every 10 minutes."

Which is a completely useless number unless you know how many people are on the system. If there are 100,000 users then for all of them to find partners would take a million minutes. If you are the median user, this means you're going to have to wait a year to find your partner. If there are only 10 users then you'll find you'll find your partner in 50 minutes. Which one is it?

Comments

[andrewducker]

Actually, that's a maths fail - you can halve those numbers, because two users find each other at the same time.

I now leave it to someone else to point out other stupid mistakes. Although my base point that without knowing how many users they have, "Someone finds a partner every 10 minutes" is meaningless still stands.

[drdoug.livejournal.com]

I'm pretty sure that the target audience for online adverts is not those who are fairly mathematically literate.

I read on the Internet somewhere* that some teeny tiny proportion of users is responsible for some staggeringly huge proportion of clickthroughs. I doubt people with a good sense of statistics are part of that group, and that adverts - through the semi-Darwinian filter of Google A/B testing - are tailored accordingly.

* This citation means it is (a) entirely true and (b) you have no way of denying any part of my claim. Win!

[drdoug.livejournal.com]

... and just to spell it out, the mark is supposed to read "Someone finds a partner every 10 minutes on Match.com" as "If I join Match.com, I will find a partner in 10 minutes".

Which is more obviously (and possibly regulatorily) wrong, hence the need for indirection.

[matgb]

This citation means it is (a) entirely true and (b) you have no way of denying any part of my claim.

It is true. I know this because I read the same article that Andy linked to. It's 9%.

Completely ignoring the point that clickthroughs are a piss poor measure of ad effectiveness, BMW don't count how many people pick up a glossy mag and go directly to a car showroom...

[henriksdal.livejournal.com]

Does that include employees of Match.Com being paid to go on dates?

[momentsmusicaux.livejournal.com]

Damn statistics!

[crm.livejournal.com]

"Someone meets their Match every 10 minutes."

to me, this implies some sort of final battle on a rockey island during a storm involving a lot of kung fu.

C-Harmony

[beachpsalms.livejournal.com]

Re: C-Harmony

[ishkhara.livejournal.com]

Brilliant! :)

Re: C-Harmony

[andrewducker]

Fantastic!

[ishkhara.livejournal.com]

I know two people on match.com (one male, one female) and neither of them have had any luck in two years. So that statement seems to be an epic fail for them both.

(And no, they definitely wouldn't be a suitable pair! *lol*)