Casual misuse of data can have severe repercussions on lives, on the economy, and on the pocketbook.
* The anti-Big dam lobby, glamorised by Ms Arundhati Roy's claims of over 50 million displaced (the likely figure being close to 5 million), has delayed construction of the Sardar Sarovar dam and possibly led to increased vulnerability to drought for a large proportion of the poor in Gujarat.
* The finance minister claims he has lowered interest rates by 1 per cent when, due to a structural decline in inflation, the real cost of capital has gone up by 4 per cent.
* The RBI states that small savings collections for 1997-98 and 1998-99 were Rs 1,54,000 crore and Rs 1,96,000 crores, respectively; it now claims (Monthly Bulletin, March 2000) that over a 100 different reported numbers were in error each year; and that the "new" data reveals collections of only Rs 47,000 crore and Rs 55,000 crores! (More on this small savings scam teaser in the next article).
* The National Sample Survey's (NSS) estimates of consumption for 1999 is half that yielded by National Accounts data; if true, then not only have the poor become poorer but so have the rich. The NSS data, taken at face value, imply that there has been zero growth in the Indian economy for at least 15 long years.
* Indian dot com companies claim to have visitor viewership that far exceeds the number of available eyeballs. And because of these exaggerated claims a lot of investors will pay dearly with their money once the truth is out.
Venture capitalists (VCs) have finally become nervous about the casual misuse of data and begun re-evaluating not only the dot coms they financed, but also their own raison d'etre. A few rotten apples are ruining things for the genuine players. It is match fixing, internet style. Part of the reason for the tall and taller claims is because genuine web information is scarce, and therefore pricey. The International Data Corporation publishes a book on global viewing habits and only charges $ 4,500 for it. No wonder that firm X can blithely claim that it receives 10 million monthly page views (MPV); who is to check, or more accurately, who is to call the bluff?
Why the exaggerated claims? (Indeed, there are rumours that Indian internet start-up firms paid people to log in to jack up the page views to receive a higher valuation). Because it profited all the "concerned parties"; the VCs because it catapulted the market (IPO) returns on their investments; the internet firm owners and employees because of higher profits, ESOPs and higher wages; the financial intermediaries because of a higher value brokered deal; the ad agencies because they were able to show to advertisers that the ad money was well spent. The losers? The entire investing Indian and global public, individuals and corporates who were sucked into the invisible eyeball vortex. The yet to burst Indian internet bubble is exactly this - claims not backed up by hard evidence; and costs of acquiring this evidence is large, and inconvenient to some pocketbooks.
The calculations below attempt to arrive at the time spent by Indians worldwide on the web. Whenever an assumption is made, it is done with a bias against the hypothesis of Indian portals casually misusing data on viewership. The first step is to establish the number of internet connections of Indians worldwide. The within-India connections are estimated to be close to 0.75 million (assume 1 million) and the non-resident Indian connections close to 0.6 million, with 3,00,000 in the US. (There are about 1.25 million Indians living in the US).
How much time is a connection hooked to the web? For the US, (data based on stringent reporting standards) internet usage is 43.3 minutes a day, and each connection is on for 13.1 days a month. So monthly minutes spent by an American on the web is 567. The data suggest that each page view takes 0.98 minutes; so monthly page views are about 580 per month.
Assume Indian usage of the web to be 20 per cent higher than an American. Thus an Indian connection views 696 page views each month. For 1.6 million connections, that is 1,110 million page views.
E-mail use needs to be subtracted from total use to arrive at web page views. Most surveys suggest that e-mail accounts for 60 to 90 per cent of usage. A conservative estimate would be 55 per cent; thus, non e-mail potential page views of websites, portals etc. for use by Indians worldwide is 500 million.
Do Indians view any non-Indian sites like Microsoft Network, Yahoo, Netscape, Lycos, Amazon, etc? Of course they do. The total MPVs of the top 15 US sites (out of several thousand) is 18.9 billion. The non e-mail component of these sites, at 45 per cent, is 8.5 billion. There are 1.6 million Indian internet connections and 68.3 million US connections. If these sites (e.g. Microsoft, Yahoo, Excite etc.) are equally popular with Indians, a reasonable assumption, then, is that 200 million non e-mail page views are used for viewing the top American sites. Thus, remaining web page views available for Indians worldwide is 500 - 200 = 300 million.
In other words, the total available space for all Indian sites with the assumption that every Indian in the world views only Indian sites (besides the top 15 US sites) is 300 million. This is the space aimed at by every Mama's daughter who cried "Mommy, Mommy, I have a website". The startling fact is that the claims of the top five Indian internet sites is almost two-thirds of the entire web usage. How accurate are these figures? Stated differently, how likely is it that every Indian internet connection in the world views Indiatimes.com for 34 minutes every month! Or how likely is it that with a potential audience of 1.6 million, Indiatimes has more page views every month than the New York Times (47 million) has with a potential audience of 68.3 million? Or that Chaitime.com gets more views than the Wall Street Journal (11.6 million)? False advertisements are bad because they muddy the web for new entrants. Since the law cannot do it, only the market can discipline the errant ones. And the "market" is composed of information and its disclosure - something attempted here.
Do the ostensibly exaggerated claims mean that the web market is over? I hope not, especially since I am actively involved in helping set-up a dot.com company, Error! Reference source not found.. A re-evaluation of content and viewership can only help the genuine content wallahs. Only the not so hype will survive and that is good. Hopefully this will also be true in the Wild Wild East - where playing with numbers and facts is an integral part of the intellectual, and policy, and market behaviour.
(The author is part owner of a relatively new website, Error! Reference source not found., a website where details of that other fix are available)
Monty Page views of Indian Portals: Fact or Fiction?
Monthly Page Views $ of total
Monthly page views per Indian visitor(MPVIV) 1110 100
Non E-mail MPVIV 500 45
Non E-mail MPVIV of top 15 US websites 200 18
Avialable MPVIV for Indian sites 300 27
INDIAN SITES
Indiatimes.com 55 18
Rediff.com 47 16
123india.com 40 13
Satyamonline.com 30 10
Hungama.com 20 6
Chaitime.com 12 4
Indianfoline.com 10 3
Cricinfo.com (among Indian viewers) 50 17
8 other cricket sites (including cricketx.com) 5 2
