Still Perhaps the Best Reason to Cheer Clinton’s Loss in the Primary

Mark Penn has a follow-up to the post that Rob made fun of earlier. And it gets worse. Remember, there are people who pay money to this guy to compile and evaluate data:

The question of how much traffic it takes to make a living also comes from the Technorati report. We say it takes “about 100,000 unique visitors a month to generate an income of $75,000 a year” and Technorati states those who had 100,000 or more unique visitors the average income is $75,000.

I trust most of you can spot the glaring logical fallacy without my help, but this is the same kind of sportswriter technique that Bill James used to make fun of because you could make Alfredo Griffin look like Honus Wagner. By bounding the hit count at the low end but not at the high end, you bundle together a ton of blogs that produce very little revenue with a few that make a large amount of revenue and pretend that they’re all part of the same class. But it should be obvious that a site like ours, that gets 200,000 or so unique hits in a typical month, is not comparable to Daily Kos, which gets 800,000, and a greatly disproportionate amount of the income is generated by a few sites at the top end. Even assuming that the $75,000 mean figure is accurate, to argue that $75,000 starts at the lowest point of your arbitrarily bounded class when it’s the overall mean is transparently absurd.

I think we can see why Penn doesn’t show his work much.