Number Games

Chromecast has been used 400,000,000 times. What does that mean?

Many years ago, I read A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper. It had a simple, unsurprising premise: numbers can be manipulated to drive people to whatever conclusion you want. It was interesting seeing all the clever ways people use to deputize numbers into service of a greater story.

Amazon is great at this. They skate by with vague statements like “the highest selling product in the electronics category” or “the fastest selling reader in fiscal quarter Q2.” We hear “biggest” or “fastest” and think “sounds like Amazon is successful” before clicking the next article. But Amazon rarely releases actual numbers. And why should they?

Lately we’ve been seeing a lot of “shipped” versus “sold” numbers. Selling a product actually means a successful sell-through. “Shipping” a product lately means you stuffed the channel and product is unsold. But when you report something like “Samsung ships a record x million devices”, the average reader thinks “sounds like Samsung is successful”. Then they click the next article. (When, in fact, Samsung is struggling right now.)

Which brings me to Chromecast. All Google will say is they’ve sold “millions” of the $35, (presumably) break-even device. But recently they announced 400 million “sessions”. Sounds impressive! A recent headline states “Chromecast turns one: why this small streaming stick became such a big deal” and the subheads are “So cheap, and so different”, “400 million cast sessions”, “Competitors are getting…