Note: This editorial is the sole opinion of Dale Ford, and doesn’t necessarily reflect the opinions and views of advertisers or sponsors of The Ford Report. No industry people or paintball media were harmed during the writing of this editorial.

“Hypocrisy”

YourDefinition.Com defines “Hypocrisy” as such:

hy·poc·risy

noun pl. hypocrisies -·sies

a pretending to be what one is not, or to feel what one does not feel; esp., a pretense of virtue, piety, etc.

Here over the past few months of so I’d get an email from Ed Rieker from time to time extolling the virtues of PBNation.Com and why I, and obviously everyone else, should advertise with them. Perfectly reasonable of him to expect that, and it’s a legitimate part of business to contact people and tell them that they ought to advertise. I do it all the time, so why shouldn’t Ed?

Well, the latest one I got last night was intriguing, to say the least. Scanning through it quickly, I came away with the impression that if I ran a site in paintball, I was doomed to failure due to the overarching superiority of PBNation.Com. Being from the Midwest, I neither intimidate easily nor do I take things at face value. Diving a little deeper into the document, I came away with some interesting observations about this piece in particular and some questions.

The three ‘main’ competitors to PBNation as depicted in the document are PaintballSportsMag.Com, PaintballX3.Com, and TechPB.Com. What’s interesting is that PBNation shows their traffic data from June ‘08 to the end of June ‘09. All fine, well, and good, right? It is until you realize that PaintballSportsMag.Com, PaintballX3.Com, and TechPB.Com are all relatively new websites, not even being in existence until mid- to late 2008, so obviously their cumulative numbers will be significantly less than PBNation.

Scrolling down further, and after conversation with one of the people targeted in the piece, we note that the dates for the statistical data don’t match. For instance, the day (presumably the best day) for PBNation is 300K users on 2/2/08. The other dates for the sampled sites mentioned range from 12/08 to 3/08, which it would be reasonable to assume that the worst days are used to compare with PBNation’s best day.

Furthermore, if you go to some of the third party analytics sites like Compete.Com, you see a slow but steady decline in traffic at PBNation.Com. Don’t get me wrong, they’re still doing a massive amount of traffic, but it’s in decline rather than growing. Convenient that this isn’t mentioned, isn’t it? Realistically, fudging numbers and playing games with statistics isn’t a big deal. I don’t do it, mainly because of a lack of knowledge on my part, but I’m sure others in the media and industry do. Google Analytics, one of the most widely respected analytics services, emails you a .pdf file of your weekly stats, or whatever time frame you want. I suppose if one were versed in Photoshop or another program capable of editing a .pdf, you could edit or create an authentic-looking Google Analytics report saying pretty much whatever you wanted it to. Is that the case here?

What I find most disturbing about PBNation’s current behavior is the hypocrisy of it. If you listen to some of the public stances they’ve made, they’re all about unity and creating a bigger pie for everyone to have a share of. They’ve made agreements with some of the media outlets for cross promotional purposes, which is all fine well and good. Hypocrisy raises its’ ugly head when you have these agreements, then release information specifically designed to hurt the people you’re supposedly working with.

The paintball media is a small community, and I have a good relationship with just about all of my colleagues. It strikes me as extremely arrogant and hypocritical to ‘play nice’ with them, then release what’s basically a come-on letter to the industry where they’re torn down. How much longer will paintball as a sport, an industry and community tolerate this sort of behavior? When upwards of 40% of your traffic is derived from people who have no interest in paintball, is it a good idea to try and denigrate the people and sites that focus entirely on paintball?

It’s unfortunate that PBNation has decided to try and live by their numbers. The reality is that numbers are hard, cold facts…they don’t lie, even if you try to manipulate them. Working with an absolute like a number opens you up to the vulnerability of having someone smarter than you analyze them in an honest way, rather than trying to serve your own interest.