Ha ha … so Jeff goofed up. We all do. Some of just choose to be a man and admit it. The humour (please note the spelling) is in the fact that he chooses to be silent about this faux pas.
On the article though … if we are mentally to divide such numbers by 10 , then we ought to divide all such reported numbers. I guess that the point myspace wants to make is that they are the biggest out there.
Jeff,
When you wrote this article, did you think that most people reading your site would ream you over just one little sentence?
Jeff:
You’re omitting one of the most important reasons to doubt those stats – bots.
Either that, or there are hundreds of drop-dead gorgeous “women” on MySpace who want to be my “friend”.
And similar to the person/user ratio not being 1:1, there are plenty of MySpace groups, bands, communities, etc.
daen:
If you consider that the estimated number of
actual internet users is somewhere between 700
and 1,100 million people it means that somewhere
between 9% to 14% of all internet users are using
MySpace. That does seem rather high to me.
Make that “have used long enough to create an account”, and I suspect that’ll include all of Hotmail and anyone who created a passport (even if on another domain… like my two). Then it starts to become more reasonable.
Eric D. Burdo:
It’s not? grumble time to go rewrite the science books…
Those’ll be the ones about creationism? 
(runs away quickly)
Richard not in the US, but working for a US multinational.
I think some people have a bad case of USA envy. :evil
Not envy, pity
I think some people have a bad case of USA envy. :evil
Not envy, pity
…or maybe hatred…
Well, Regardless of the people in the world, his point was that… well, “Total users does not equal total usage”.
On a side note… I’m suprised those servers can manage to hold 100M users… Lol. pukes a the .cfm extension
Just because we have morons running the country please don’t take it out on Jeff.
Or at least thank him as agressively as you bash him when he writes something you like.
One in 5 people in the world are chinese.
That means someone in my family is chinese.
There’s John, Pete, Chang and Sissy and Me.
I think its John.
;p
It struck me the same way, too – that Jeff was limiting that number to Americans. I’m guessing he’ll be a little more careful in his analogies next time.
In any event, I had always wondered the same thing about AOL user counts as reported by AOL back in the 90s. Did anyone ever look into that? The numbers were so improbably high that I thought they were reporting screen name counts vs. the number of paying accounts.
reminds me of a simpsons quote:
“You, sir, are worse than Hitler.” - Selma and patty’s boss at the DMV on the Simpsons when she thought Homer smoked two cigs at once.
you guys should lighten up, jeff just used amarica as an example. And if he thinks Amarica is the center of the universe is that so bad? Dont you guys generelize the same way, when you say “It is so typical Americans to think they are the world” ?
I can understand to some extend why usa are not very popular at the momemt, but this “popularity” on hating amaricans are stupid.
The northpole are probably the only country that Jeff could have used that would not piss off some internet users, but hey Northpole would not be able to populate MySpace, and I guess that is Jeff’s point with the post.
some serious haters up in here… Jeff is only human
The fact that myspace has 100 millions users doesn’t mean that 1 out of 3 americans have an account. There are A LOT of non american myspace users. Me included.
I am shocked that even Jeff Atwood thinks that USA == World.
Gee Whiz - cant you just read it for what it is? Is it really necessary to critique this guy? Perhaps, just read it and close it. Does anyone care what you folks really think? Nope!
I don’t think I’ve ever seen such worthless comments for a blog post. My god, it’s bad enough that ONE person would point out that the US != World, but when 15+ people do it…ugh.
Actually namehere, that was only pointed out 13 times, which is equivalent to 108% of non-american internet users (one of them posted twice).
I don’t think for a minute anyone seriously called Jeff up on his “1/3 Americans” remark because they hate america.
And with respect, “I have a hard time believing that 1 in 3 Americans could conceivably be MySpace users” makes no suggestion of equivalence or comparison.
I think its an honest mistake, but its fair to raise it, less any vitriol.
Jesus, Tough crowd here eh?
Comedy Night at coding horror…
Readers: “OMG OMG OMG OMG, Jeff Atwood just said that there are only 2 religions in the world. Does he really think that $religion doesn’t exist. He probably thinks that $religionists still live in Caves without electricity, what a total moron!!!”
Seriously guys, often times people use comparisons to help explain the vastness of numbers. e.g. there are 5 million people in Ireland, so when someone tells me that L.A has 7 million people, it helps me realise how big that is when I work out that the entire population of my country could fit in L.A. and still have space for more.
Anyways, I must go back to work in another town that wasn’t mentioned in this blogpost, therefore non-existant.
Good post Jeff.
Des