Blogs Offer New Opportunities For Press Release Ridiculousness

Overhype

from the fun-with-idiocy dept

Clueless PR people absolutely love to come out with the most idiotic press releases (many of which they send to us here at Techdirt). Among our favorites are announcements about how a certain company had a “successful appearance” at a trade show — as if the expectation was that their booth was going to catch fire and burn to the ground. It appears that blogs are offering yet another opportunity for the bogus press release. Witness an announcement today from a well known (and highly promotional) web hosting/domain name registration company (no need to name them) that came out with the absolutely ridiculous announcement that their CEO’s blog is the 23rd most popular blog out there. First off, since when do you celebrate being the 23rd most popular of anything, unless you’re into obscure literary references? However, even more bizarre is how the company came to this conclusion — which could be easily disputed. There are probably a hundred different lists of the most popular 100 blogs out there, all measured in completely different, and often contradictory ways. So you could pick any way you want — but, in this case, the company has combined two different methods, because no single method alone actually proved the point. Instead, they pulled up the site’s Alexa ranking, which is notoriously inaccurate in being a real representation of traffic. Then, the company went down Technorati’s Top 100 list (again, wildly inaccurate in some ways), which the site in question isn’t actually listed in and compared those sites’ Alexa numbers to the CEO’s blog’s Alexa ranking, and found that it would rank about 23rd in Alexa rankings, if you had a Technorati 100 list weighted by Alexa rankings — a combination that makes no sense. Amusingly, Techdirt’s Alexa ranking (which we agree is indicative of pretty much nothing) is about the same as this particular CEO’s, so perhaps we’re the 24th most popular blog out there. Somehow, I doubt it, but maybe we should send out a press release, just in case.