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Comment by citricsquid | Hacker News Reader

Robert Scoble makes his money by having lots of followers, so obviously follower counts matter to him, but they have absolutely no bearing on whether or not a site is a "ghost town" or not. I can follow Robert Scoble on G+ and NEVER interact with any of his content, so can 1,500,000 others (which is what has happened) and somehow that isn't a ghost town?

If you want real hard evidence that G+ is a ghost town (in that nobody uses it):

Robert Scoble posted a video yesterday: https://plus.google.com/111091089527727420853/posts/ToU5ESJY... and that video got 778 views (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rcLhi1VUbmc).

Out of 1,500,000 "followers" on Google+ less than 1,000 take notice of his posts. That's even worse than Twitter.

View on HN

I think you're putting too much value on that one data point in order to prove the "ghost town" theory. Scoble actually gets crazy amounts of interaction with his posts. Just look at how many comments each of his posts get, not to mention that every dicussion is on point and "right there". And it's not just quantifiable interaction like comments. For example, I generally don't comment on posts from people I don't know but on an averge day even I will skim through whatever latest thing Scoble has written...because he's Scoble you know? His is a kind of self-fueling notoriety. I think it's definitely arguable whether G+ is a ghost town or not, but Scoble is probably the last example you should use to argue the pro-ghost-town side.

Photo gallery from the Golden Gate National Cemetery, +295 and 57 comments.

Photo gallery from his son's graduation, +135 and 31 comments.

Video (that I posted above), +107 with 17 comments.

Video of "Engagio", +40 with 8 comments.

He has 1,500,000 followers and his best post gets ~300 +1's and ~60 comments, the average post gets ~100 +1s and ~30 comments. The only reason the post about G+ not being a ghost town is popular is because it was spread around the internet (eg: HN) and it's flame bait...

> on an averge day even I will skim through whatever latest thing Scoble has written

And will you actually pay attention to it? Consume the content? If you're not watching the videos he posts or reading his writing you're not engaged. Less than 1,000 people out of 1,500,000 people clicked on his video, they didn't even need to watch it for a view to count, just click on it. How can you claim for one second that he has an engaged audience when less than 0.05% of his audience click his video. I have better engagement than that on Twitter and Facebook and I'm some no-name internet guy.

If the engagement levels for posts are less than 1% I don't think it can be considered active at all. Follower counts are meaningless, I think the majority of "Social Media" sites get it wrong: someone that followed me 4 years ago probably isn't still (actively) following me today, but if follower counts only reflected actively engaged users people like Scoble would cry because it doesn't validate their whole "I'm super popular hire me" shtick.

I've said it before, Scoble is a part of the Mashable type of Social Media, people subscribe that don't really care about what he says they just follow/subscribe because of what he represents: Social Media. They feel that to be relevant in Social Media they have to follow Scoble, just like they have to read Mashable. They don't care about them or engage with their content, they just subscribe so they can say they do. Mashable has 2.6m Twitter followers, tweets an article and gets 6 comments. Worthless.

I tend to agree that someone like Scoble does not form the best basis to cast judgement on how engaged G+ is (even though he proves that G+ is not a ghost town). Apart from his other talents and selling points, he has also benefited from his being an early adopter of the platform. As such I'd say a large number of his followers don't hang on to every word or comment he may make.

On the other hand look at the stats of true tech luminaries like Linus Torvalds: thousands of likes, hundreds of reshares and comments per post. Torvalds is the kind of guy - with nothing technologically left to prove - that the G+ community enjoys following very closely. There is no way your G+ stream can be a ghost town if you follow people like Torvalds and far lesser luminaries (but greatly accomplished folks) on G+.

I think you are using the wrong calculation to determine "engagement levels" (whatever the heck that is). You keep saying "look he has 1.5 million followers yet he only got 50 comments on this one particular post" then you proceed to extrapolate some minuscule "engagement rating" out of that.

There are a few things which I think are better indicators of engagement than comments-on-a-post / followers.

1) I would instead look at how many people he engaged with over the lifetime of his G+ activity. Or if you insist on analysing individual posts, then try to determine what percentage of the segment that the post was intended for responded to the post in some way. I bet not all of his 1.5 million followers are American, or iPhone users, or Android developers, or photographers... or any number of factors you could use to segment your audience.

2) How are you comparing your chosen metrics to other platforms? Does Twitter or Facebook have better or worse engagement? I just checked out his Facebook profile and that same Golden Gate National Cemetery that got him a measly 54 comments on G+, earned him only 2 comments on Facebook (one of which was Scoble's reply to the first and really the only comment). So while he seems to be getting even crappier results on Facebook, I don't think anyone could say that Facebook is a ghost-town. Perhaps it would be valid to say that internet just sucks for marketing in general... But here's a hint: In my 9-5 I am both an internet and a traditional marketer (I sell subscriptions). I can assure you that all my cost-per-order analyses heavily favour the adwords/social/SEO/e-mail campaigns to the direct-mail/fax/telemarketing campaigns. (I sell a low value product so maybe this is why my CPO leans this way. If you sell $1K-$10K products you might find that nothing replaces a phone call for value)

3) You cannot look at a single point in time and make a judgement call. You should look at the trend-changes over a longer period of time. Skate where the puck is going to be and all that jazz.

4) Quality of engagement is important too. A response which consists of at least one or two sentences that add something meaningful to the discussion and illicit another response from somebody else is a 100 times more valuable then an endless stream of "Cool! Thanks for posting."

Many of YC companies that claim they have millions of users they get only 3K reviews on iTunes, are they lying then?

YouTube views on a 20 minute video are a terrible metric. Many people are going to start, notice the length, and stop watching. A better metric would be to compair the average +1/like/fav and shares of posts to each site.

Views are not measured based on whether or not people watch to the end, if you click on a video a view is counted, whether you watch it for 1 second or 20 minutes is only reflected in the internal Youtube metrics.

Don't views on youtube take a while to update? I've noticed videos posted on reddit with thousands of likes on youtube, but hundreds of views.

They do. You generally see popular videos stuck around 300 for a while though and if it is showing 800 it probably is accurate within a few hundred views.

Google has never announced how they count views. They have announced that recommended videos are suggested based on the % of videos watched. I would think some of that same technology is being used in the view count.

http://youtubecreator.blogspot.com/2012/05/note-about-recent...

I'm confused.

> Google has never announced how they count views. They have announced that recommended videos are suggested based on the % of videos watched. I would think some of that same technology is being used in the view count.

What do you mean? Surely there is no magical technology or algorithms behind view count? "If a unique user watches a video increment the counter by 1" why would they need anything more complex than this?

I know there is a lot of abuse protection but I'm not sure how this fits in with my assertion that 1 click = 1 view. There was a bug a few months back with Youtube that didn't apply anti-abuse checking to Mobile views (viewing a video from a mobile device) and a group of blackhat people abused this and sold views: they would view a video 1,000,000 times as if it was being viewed from a mobile device and Youtube would count 1,000,000 views, even if it was all from the same IP.

I'm not sure how it's debatable that if 800 people click on a Youtube video link then 800 views will be counted, what reason would they have for not counting 800 views if 800 people clicked on it?

The abuse protection algo works something like:

Total data transferred to unique IPs / size of the video.

Because the logs are all over the place (CDNs), it takes about 1 day for the view count to be updated.

This is a more accurate and abuse proof way of counting "views". Your simple "1 click = 1 view" is abuse prone, which is why it is not done this way.

> Total data transferred to unique IPs / size of the video

can you expand on this? Do you mean that if the video is 1MB and 200 UNIQUE IPs download 500kb each it will count as 100 views?

Right.

There is a difference between a page view and a video video view. The video views really should not increment unless someone watches them all the way through (or at least most of the way through). Since Google has not announced how they tally the view count I was just pointing out evidence that they are probably considering % of videos watched in the view count.

> The video views really should not increment unless someone watches them all the way through

Although this would be better it's not what they do. I'm a Youtube Partner and from the analytics I have access to I can see that no matter how long a user watches for a view is counted, otherwise they would not be able to provide "user retention" statistics.

"Absolute audience retention helps you see how often each moment of your video is being watched as a percentage of total views. Rewinding and rewatching can result in values of higher than 100%"

http://i.imgur.com/r6Wr0.jpg

Snoop Dogg posted "smokn one" on Facebook and got 49,000 "Likes." There's more to interaction than clicks.

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