very cool that we can’t trust numbers anymore

Even the most “I don’t keep track of traffic numbers because I’m a v. srs journalist and don’t measure my worth in clicks!!!” purist needs to read the lead — at the very least — of The Verge’s writeup about Comscore getting charged for fraud by the SEC yesterday and reflect on the poetic irony of this life we have chosen:

Comscore, the influential analytics firm that measures web traffic, has been formally accused of falsely reporting its own revenue and customer numbers. 

AKA, the Nielsen of the internet, AKA the leading resource that all our managers and CEOs and editors alike have been using to measure basic shit like pageviews and clicks, AKA a huge deciding factor in who in digital media gets to keep their jobs or not has been MAKING THEIR OWN SHIT UP……………………..so obviously, the assumption that Comscore has been NOT scamming the rest of us metrics-driven bondservants (if you somehow think you aren’t one, you are either clueless or are delivering your newspaper via pigeon post) seem…….low. 

If all this is giving you PTSD, let us not soon forget how the whole pivot-to-video industry sea change was based on big fat ass lie from our boi Markie...or hey, all the shady as hell stuff AOL pulled with their online ads in the ‘90s (see here and the WaPo investigation here). Ya know, coming from a profession that gets made fun of often because we don’t “do math”………...y’all seem to have a very interesting definition of “numbers” and “metrics” and “trust” over there.