In this age of fake news, anything that can be scrutinised will be scrutinised.

And the latest platform to be on the receiving end of this scrutiny is 8 Days, an entertainment rag that used to be popular before the age of the Internet.

Page views announcement

8 Days recently announced that it will cease the print edition of the magazine in September 2018, to go fully digital.

Chinese-language sister publication, i-Weekly (i周刊), will also go the same route.

Mediacorp's official reasoning was to allow 8 Days and i-Weekly to "focus on growing their digital properties which have gained popularity over the past year".

The press release cited an average of 2.1 million page views a month for 8 Days website, since its launch last April.

i-Weekly, on the other hand, reportedly has an average of 1.3 million page views per month since its revamp last July.

Not accurate?

But this pulling of numbers out of thin air didn't sit well with some Singaporeans.

One digital citizen, Kenneth Lee, was cynical about 8days.sg raking in an average of 2.1 million page views a month.

He called out the figure and disputed it, as evident in his comment on Channel NewsAsia's Facebook post on the news.

Lee pointed out that views from the last few months, as analysed by website ranking SimilarWeb tool, were just a little more than half of the quoted average of 2.1 million.

Lee pointed out that even with the four-month peak during December of 440,000 viewers, that would only tally up to about 1.5 million page views a month.

This is after one multiplies the number of views with the number of pages each visitor browses (which is 3.5 for 8 Days' case).

Running 8days.sg through the SimilarWeb shows that indeed, the number of visits in December was 440,000.

However, instead of 3.5 pages per visit as Lee had stated, the site said that visitors checked out an average 3.73 pages on the site for each visit.

This leads us to about 1.64 million views per month, which is still shy of the 2.1 million figure.

8 Days responds

Could it be that it might be an issue with SimilarWeb itself?

In response to Lee, 8 Days said it uses a tagging system from Adobe Analytics, which is an "industry-leading premium source" for their data on viewership.

SimilarWeb, according to 8 Days, is a "freemium site that uses estimations."

Lee didn't take that statement lying down.

He responded that SimilarWeb is quite accurate, and major websites and companies use the site.

He also challenged 8 Days to share some of their analytics data to prove that they are indeed hitting 2.1 million page views.

This can be done if 8 Days logged their data with SimilarWeb, if it disputes the figures presented.

Lee's contention is that advertisers should be very worried about spending money should there be disparities.

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SimilarWeb accurate?

There is a possibility that SimilarWeb is tabulating numbers approximately.

As mentioned, data will be more accurately represented when the website is logged or paired with a programme that can more closely observe site behaviour in real-time.

For example, SimilarWeb shows Mothership's numbers as 3.9 million page views, but our own data from Google Analytics (available on our About Us page) is 5.9 million.

However, until proven otherwise with evidence, Singaporeans in their heightened state of spotting fake news might find factoids thrown around a little odd.

In any case, consumers by and large do not know or care about how media derive numbers or how Adobe Analytics functions.

Perhaps it's something we'll find out in time.

Or never.

Top image via 8days.sg