Tony Perkins' embarrassing web stats
To turn around the phrase on its head, on the web, everyone knows you're a dog. The internet may provide anonymity to individuals, but it leaves publishers nowhere to hide. A reader emails in about Tony Perkins, 'creator' and editor-in-chief of AlwaysOn …
Context & Ripple Effects
Traffic figures had already become public ammunition between blog publishers by early 2006: Jason Calacanis published head-to-head Weblogs Inc. versus Gawker stats while promoting his weblog ad directory, treating measured audience as a selling point rather than a private number. Mark Pincus, meanwhile, was openly asking where the love for web 2.0 actually was, reflecting skepticism about hype outrunning real usage.
Valleywag's jab at Tony Perkins — identified as creator and editor-in-chief of AlwaysOn — fits that same logic pointed the other way: a reader checked the numbers and found them wanting. The point of the piece is less the figure itself than the asymmetry it exposes — individuals get anonymity online, but publishers who claim reach leave a public, checkable trail.
First-order effects
- AlwaysOn's audience claims are now open to anyone's verification, which discounts the property's credibility with exactly the advertisers its ad-supported model depends on.
- Perkins personally takes the reputational hit, since the story attaches the shortfall to him as the site's 'creator' rather than to an anonymous masthead.
Second-order effects
- Rival blog publishers gain an incentive to publish or cite third-party-measured numbers themselves, extending the precedent set by the Weblogs Inc.–Gawker comparison and turning traffic audits into a standard attack vector in media feuds.
- Advertisers weighing blog placements can demand measured reach over self-description, shifting bargaining power toward whoever controls the measurement.
Third-order effects
- If publisher reach stays publicly falsifiable, the nascent blog-advertising economy sorts into audited audiences versus unverifiable ones, with 'creator' credentials losing pricing power to raw, checkable traffic.
- The pattern points toward independent measurement becoming the arbiter of disputes in a medium where anyone can check the scoreboard — a structural break from print-era publisher discretion.
The trend: Web publishing is shifting from self-declared audience claims to externally verifiable traffic, making every publisher's stated reach a checkable claim.