Washington Redskins Claim 7.8 Billion Unique Visitors Read About Training Camp Last Year
By Jason Lisk
The Washington Redskins are a popular team. In fact, one might say if the Cowboys are America’s team, Washington is the World’s team. At least, that’s what Dan Snyder’s folks would have you believe. They claim that the number of unique visitors reading Washington training camp coverage exceeds the entire human population of planet Earth, according to D.C. Sports Bog.
How is this possible? Well, Washington hired third-party media monitoring services Meltwater and TVEyes to come up with an assessment, and let’s just say it relies on some questionable accounting. Counting unique visitors is a game anyway, but the way Washington’s consultants handled it stretches it to “out of this world.”
Forget that you might use multiple devices and have those separately count on the same website, because this further explanation might make your head spin.
"The team also explained that each article accrues the total unique visitor count of each site on which it appears. As an example, “if six articles on ESPN.com contain the specified search terms within the specified timeframe, the website’s unique visitor count (and accompanying value) is multiplied by six.” Fifteen Redskins articles on our site would credit the Richmond coverage with our millions of Washington Post unique visitors, times 15."
So, if I’m reading this right, this method would probably view this article as talking about Washington’s training camp, and credit the training camp as being responsible for all our traffic, from Brady’s suspension, to Colin Cowherd, to Hulk Hogan. Yikes.
Perhaps this will put into context just how extremely absurd this accounting is, if you know, the size of the earth’s population didn’t do it. If you separately add up the unique visitors of the Top 50 media companies by June 2015 Comscore rankings, you still come up about 3 billion short of Washington’s claim. (and we know that most of us are separate unique visitors for multiple of those companies on that list).
As Dan Steinberg of D.C. Sports Bog points out, this nonsense, though, has real implications. The team is trying to claim to the city of Richmond benefits because of the total interest, which is worth at least $76,146,720.61, the “minimum total value of the coverage generated for the City of Richmond throughout the 2014 Bon Secours Washington Redskins Training Camp.”
Seems reasonable.