KentTV - since when did a video view mean a unique visitor?

Kent County Council seem to be at it again. defending Kent TV, saying "more than 2.2 million people have sought out and watched Kent TV over the last two years is a strong indicator of public opinion." But have they? Have they really?

I'm not a massive conspiracy theorist, but since the redesign of the Kent CC web site (www.kent.gov.uk) I can't now locate the visitor statistic pages on Kent TV (www.kenttv.com) which used to be at http://www.kent.gov.uk/NR/rdonlyres/7812FA42-1FB6-4B3C-9161-452174867FF6/21747/KentTVViewingStatisticsforKentgov1.pdf

Happily, the Google cached version at http://tinyurl.com/ykcorak gives the figures I was looking for. If one uses the "more generous" figure of video plays rather than unique visitors, then in their best month for those figures (January 2009) they had 90,571 video views.

If you assume that that is 1 video viewing per person in Kent (pop 1,394,000) then as a percentage, 6.4% of people watched a video. This is clearly a massive overestimate, as it assumes each person only watches one video each a month, all viewers come from Kent, and chooses the best month for which statistics are available.

As a contrast, the kent.gov.uk web site gets somewhere around 3 times as many visitors as Kent TV - in January 2009 http://tinyurl.com/yzbcqug (again, Google cache is our friend) shows that the total Unique Visitors was 231,206 - about 2.5 times that of Kent TV. In fact in March 2009, (last month figures for both are available for) the comparative figures for kent.gov.uk are unique visitors 263,221, Kent TV video views 70,616 - about 3.5 times more.

There are other oddities in the Kent TV figures. at least one PC in County Hall is set to view KentTV all day, every day. Taking a standard day, lets assume Kent TV shows 10 videos an hour, and a PC is on 10 hours a day. that's 100 video views for just one PC per day - moving towards 3,000 a month, and around 5% of the video view total in itself. and that assumes, generously, that that's the only PC in Kent where that is happening. Imagine how many video views 5 of them, left on 24 hours a day, would get through...

Another observation: look at the November 2008 figures: less video plays than unique visitors or page views. Now for a site where the video autoplays when you open a page, that sounds suspicious to me. Are people turning off the video THAT quickly?! And if so, what does that say for the popularity of what is supposed to be the main content - video?

it seems to me that not only are we not getting good value from Kent TV (which has cost £1.8m in the last few years and rising) but that even the figures used to justify it are more than open to question. I'm happy to be corrected or updated: if you have more information or analysis (or can even find more up to date figures!) then please do email me at tim@prater.org.uk