A mile wide, an inch deep — Medium
[…] everyone is in a “war for attention.” But it uses unique visitors as the way to compare how different outlets are doing in this war: […]
By this metric (misleadingly labeled “readership”), Buzzfeed is “bigger” than The New York Times. But that’s the exact same metric that would tell us last week was bigger for Medium than that week in October. Even if all we care about is attention — not any other value that may be important— this doesn’t tell us much. Maybe BuzzFeed gets more attention, total, than The Times. But we should stop purporting that one-dimensional graphs like this tell us that.