Updated again on Thursday afternoon:
A reader who owns a digital business takes issue with Nikki's comment on the same post (linked below) that this month she "celebrates (DHD's) 3rd anniversary and 50 million unique users."
He writes that this is impossible:
"Every time 1 person comes to your site, it's a unique. It doesn't matter if they come just one time or every day forever, they are still counted as only 1 unique. Let's say she has 1M unique readers per month (which she is not even close to that), but for arguments sake we will use 1M. Now, most of her readers are repeat viewers, so if she has 1M in Jan, and 1M in Feb, that doesn't mean she has 2M uniques. Let's say that 750K are the same people that visit several times, and then she has 250K random strays that stumble upon the site in each month, that means she has 1.25M uniques over those 2 months.
"She could have maybe spinned 5M over 3 years even though that isn't true either, but 50 Million would be like Lindsey Lohan saying she starred in Back to the Future. It's beyond preposterous, it's just that most people don't have any clue what the numbers mean so they don't realize how ridiculous of a lie it is."
He points out, correctly, that this doesn't mean her site will not sell.
Updated on Thursday morning:
Nikki just called to complain about this post in very emphatic terms, but most of what she said was off the record, so I can't share.
She did say, on the record, that she has never said that her site is bigger than Variety, only that Neil Stiles told her that his research showed DHD was a bigger "destination" site. (I've linked to her post below, so you can check it verbatim.)
"I don't know what that means, if that's readership or what," she said. "That's according to my notes. I've never said my readership is bigger."
Maybe I need to call Neil Stiles on that one.
Previously:
As far as I’m concerned, everybody’s feeling uncomfortable these days. And they should. It’s an uncomfortable time.
I called up Peter Bart, the longtime editor of Variety and a longtime friend, to ask about this report that he’d ordered up a “hit piece” on Nikki Finke – three of them, in fact – because she infuriates him: beating Variety on stories while berating other reporters yet never acknowledging when she makes mistakes.
To add insult to injury, Nikki (do I really have to call her “Finke”?) says that she was approached by Neil Stiles, Bart’s boss, to inquire about Variety’s buying her blog, Deadline Hollywood Daily. That must have stung.
“I’d never comment on anything having to do with Nikki Finke,” said Bart. “I’m not interested in internecine quarrels.”
Nonetheless, he acknowledged having ordered up the piece by Cynthia Littleton that took Nikki to task (and oddly, lumped TheWrap’s reporting about the Motion Picture Fund Home into this analysis), and another by Mike Fleming that questioned the journalistic enterprise of blogging.
