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

[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...