Filed under: Business, Internet, News, Web services
Does sampling user data give an accurate picture of traffic?

BusinessWeek takes a look at how inaccuracy means trouble for some web upstarts, and at the ongoing struggle by some to straighten out the numbers game. Digg, for example, recently hired heavy-hitting web analytics firm Web Side Story to get to the bottom of a massive gap in their own numbers and those presented by traffic rating firms. Digg's own data showed 15 million uniques per month, while comScore put them at 1-2 million unique visitors for the same period. The difference in ad dollars for a gap like that are enormous, but percentage-wise they can't begin to compare to the plight of many smaller web-fish. "For many, traffic numbers decide not just the price of an ad but whether the advertiser inquires about an ad at all"
So, just how good at time waster games are you? Think you've got the stuff? Well, The World's Hardest Game 2.0 doesn't think you do.
Yes, amazingly, it's possible to have a sequel to a game called "The World's Hardest Game". It doesn't seem logically possible, since if the first one was actually the world's hardest, how could another one come along and share the moniker? It made me doubt the name in the first place. That is, until I tried the game.
The mechanics of the game are very simple. You are a small red square, ...
