by frog
When the numbers are really big, be very suspicious of them. I was rather blown away when I heard Labour and National agents claiming in the media that millions of people had logged on to their student loan and tax calculators. Last week, Tau Henare and Laila Harre were invited on to Linda Clark’s Radio NZ show to talk about Don Brash’s sexist remarks after his loss to Helen Clark in the TVNZ debate. Henare repeated at every opportunity that Kiwis didn’t care about Brash’s sexism, but were passionate about National’s tax cut policy. He cited the two million figure on several occasions. I thought: Two million? That’s more than one in every two voters!
However, Ainsley Thomson at the Herald has done a good job debunking these confusing figures.
It would seem that the number of “unique views” (as in, views from different computers) of the calculators are much, much smaller. Labour had around 30,000 unique views on its tax relief calculator and 7,000 on its student loan calculator. National has had around 60,000 unique views on its tax calculator. (To put this in context, David Farrar gets around 40,000 unique visits a month.) These are still big numbers – 60,000 is about 3.5% of the number of people who voted in the 2002 election – but not nearly as momentous as one would have originally thought upon hearing the “over a million hits!’ histrionics.
Published in Campaign by frog on Tue, August 30th, 2005
Tags: environment
on the trolls and those who are unable to keep on topic
I wondered how long it would take someone to work out the difference between hits and visits.
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loke every time we visit here with the intention hit a frwwog thing mn,
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