The Nielsen Ratings

We don’t envy the challenge print magazines have at maintaining their online presence. Write for the magazine and get paid in subscriptions – write for the website and drain the marketing budget. Some magazines move old articles from the magazine to the website, while others try to feed the beast with a steady diet of fresh stories.

In our humble opinion, Elaine Bunting of Yachting World seems to have found an ideal groove of providing newsy features with a casual writing style. They are short bites, but always valuable. A recent post of hers gave us a good giggle, as she wants to expose some of the sailing website that like to announce their greatness through inflated and misleading web stats.

Apparently, Yachting World purchased a £7k licence for audit software, has been looking into the stats of some of these sailing website, and is getting ready to reveal the rankings. As Bunting calls it, the software is a “cross between an internet lie detector and a giant Bullshit Taser.” We are eager to see the results, though with the large number of Scuttlebutt readers that receive the e-Newsletter, we suspect that our website will not be among the leaders. That’s okay, just so there is a single means of measuring everybody, and the boasters get revealed if they have been "cooking the books."