Fast Company recently kicked off the Influence Project, an audacious effort to determine “Who are the most influential people online right now?” Unfortunately, they have made the same critical flaw in their measurement of influence that many first time and/or unsophisticated advertisers make — ie, focusing on clicks.
Under “How We Measure Influence” they clearly state their measurement philosophy:
The scale of your influence is based on…
1. The number of people who directly click on your unique URL link. This is the primary measure of your influence, pure and simple.
2. You will receive partial “credit” for subsequent clicks generated by those who sign-up as a result of your URL.
Essentially, this means, the primary form of measurement is clicks with a small component of the measure being people who sign up (or what we call “conversions”).
Here is why this is a problem. As of today, August 3rd, here is the #1 most influential person according to their measurement:
Yes, yours truly. However, if you go into rank view, you can see that I have only directly signed up 6 people. So, although I have sent a significant amount of click traffic I have driven very few conversions. In the online advertising world, this is equivalent of sending low value (or no value) traffic to an advertisers site and getting paid for it. This is a tactic we strongly advise advertisers to avoid, as a measurement of the post-click activity is far more important than the number of unique clicks.
Compare this to Mari Smith, an SEO consultant who has dominated the Influence Project rankings for most of the competition. She is currently ranked #2 in influence but has driven 346 people to sign up. Further downline from her initial signups (or conversions) she has driven thousands of additional signups as a result of her efforts.
In my opinion, there is no way you can argue that I am more influential than Mari as she is clearly driving more action from her referred visitors and more value to Fast Company’s efforts. In addition, some of the clicks I have sent I know are of zero value but there seems to be no measure of the value of an individual click.
In the ad world, businesses that pay on clicks quickly end up with 30-50% of their traffic being fraudulant. With no measure of click quality or value put on post-click performance, click traffic becomes the wild west. I would bet that Fast Company would see click volumes at 10-100x the current levels if they were paying even $.10 a click. According to some pundits, Fast Company should be paying per click given all the link love they are getting out of this controversial Influence Project.
I am considering testing the impact of sending high quality traffic to the Influence Project, rather than continuing my test of sending a stream of low to no value clicks, but to what end? Given that it is clear this project is focused nearly exclusively on clicks it is hard to imagine that any resulting rankings will be of any meaningful value. To argue that the “winner” is actually the most influential person on the web is simply a false argument.
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