Hacker News Reader

Comment by ugh | Hacker News Reader

Either I’m not getting it or he didn’t change the graph correctly. The light blue line are tumblr’s US visitors (green are tumblr’s global visitors). Why did he shift that line? And why only tumblr’s US numbers, not global?

The two dark blue lines are Posterous’s visitors (again, US and global) and they are always less than tumblr’s, all the time. Shifting doesn’t seem to change anything.

Here is the graph with labels: http://www.quantcast.com/profile/trafficGraph?wunit=wd%3Acom...

View on HN

You are correct. The author did not correctly read the graphs. The time shift was done on tumblr's US numbers vs. The global numbers. The posterous data was ignored at the bottom.

Yikes-- I misread the graph. The post is adjusted. Sincere apologies to folks for the incorrect analysis on my part.

The point stands though. This is a race without a finish line. With two runners circling the track, it's more about who cramps up when. Tumblr was at ~7m uniques per month at the stage that Posterous is currently at (~2.5m uniques). Certainly ahead, but not quite the blowout the RWW is reporting.

actually if your point was "Tumblr Doesn't Leave Posterous in the Dust " the misread does kind of kill your whole post.

There are three kinds of lies -- lies, damn lies, and statistics.

Daily pageviews here is probably the least useful metric to evaluate our site, given that Posterous doesn't chase pageviews and send daily subscription emails (full text bodies) to users directly. Users can also reply to comments via email without ever going back to the site. The monthly numbers are much more in line and reflect the way our users use the site.

Having a competitor be 4 million uniques ahead of you when you're 2 years into a consumer internet race? I dunno. Wordpress.com, by comparison, has about 160m uniques per month (per quantcast). Tumblr and Posterous are still in "small potatoes" country-- it's anybody's game.

4M vs 400K is a pretty wide margin. You also tried to compare growth rates which didn't exist. Finally you're also are showing a graph with Tumblr's growth climbing and postereous's growth pretty flat. If anything you just reinforced the point that Tumblr is leaving postereous in the dust.

look at y axis and now look at Posterous numbers.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com