Reality is Very Important

I know much of Advertising is Hype. Everything is elastic. Commercials take liberties with products and brands to prey on your emotions for good or bad. Best example is Multi-Vitamins. I take one everyday. Yet there have been countless studies showing no benefit.

I don't believe Facebook and Twitter's numbers. They are hollow. We all see tons of inactive accounts. Yet it seems both sites claim all user accounts are active each month. That's like me saying I feel great every day even when I don't. They benefit financially if they numbers are believed. I have a Finance Degree. I can work the numbers and I know they fib. Whatever. I can careless what they say as long as my clients and future investors know the truth.

So Twitter has 70 million accounts and only 50 million tweets per day. Facebook has 400 million accounts yet only 60 million updates per day. I know many people who update their status multiple times per day. Nowhere does either site state how many people are on the site per day!

The closest Facebook shows is time spent of 55 minutes per day. But we all know many of us are signed in all day long while only spending 10-20 minutes on the site. This evasiveness benefits the VC's and the Companies. It creates hype and belief in the product in hopes of going IPO. Once the IPO happens they won't care anymore unless they lose paper/equity/money when that event happens (very likely).

Now I see article after article and tweets galore that Apple has sold out of the first run of I Pads. But not one article has a number of units. Only one article gave an estimate of 500,000. If that is true its a home run of sorts for $250 mil gross. But don't forget they are sold online and through retail outlets so Apples take is much less than that. And I will bet the R&D investment was more than that. But definitely a good start. But what if it was just 100,000 units? That's only $50 mil in sales gross. Not as impressive. Actually a potential bomb. But if Apple get's people believing the highest number possible, they will invigorate the App Ecosystem to create Apps for the product. And Apple really needs to have 3-5 million units out there to have a big enough ecosystem for App Developers to have hopes of making good money.

So my point is real numbers are important. Reality is important. And beware when you read or hear anything that doesn't have concrete details.