Lessons in Careful Reading

The webmaster of Not The Onion--a gentleman named Michael Molino--emailed me to complain about my characterization of NTO. He said, "You claim that with more writers, we get less hits," and demanded an apology.

Seeing how I never said this, I refuse to apologize. What I said was, "It gets almost as few hits as YL, and with many more writers." When I use the "almost as few" construction, I am implying that the former has more than the latter. To imply otherwise is to fail to demonstrate a mastery of the English language.

Perhaps Mr. Molino was objection to my characterization of NTO as getting "almost as few" hits as YL because it implies a certain closeness in the numbers. He did send me NTO's unique visitors chart from July.



I also obtained YL's unique visitors chart from July.



As you can see, NTO did have more unique visitors than YL during July. I am not disputing that. But they don't look as disparate as all that to me. The NTO scale runs from 0 to 180; the YL scale runs from 0 to 160. Yes, NTO does seem to have a more plateau shape than YL (although the deep valley in the middle was caused by 1 & 1's server going down, not a dry spell). But come on. Is this really worth bickering about? Well, Mr. Molino?