WE WORSHIP SATAN DOT COM Lies, Damn Lies, Statistics and Parkwest Math Okay, recently I've found where parkwest allegedly conducted an independant audit of customer satisfaction. How about these paid clickers we are hearing about on louie louie blog. How do you know they are paid clickers? well let's run the numbers shall we? WARNING : FOR THOSE WHO LIKE NUMBERS STRAIGHT UP .. THESE COME WITH A PARKWEST BENT TWIST. Alrighty, here we go. Parkwest just celebrated their 40th birthday .. uhm, guys let's try 39. follow me on this one . i know it is going to be tough. 1969+40 (if you can't do it in your head please use a calculator)=2009. Hmm, it is currently 2008 .. so that would be one less. Ok .. 39th birthday. Next the frassati guy claims that parkwest has a 50k to 1 customer satisfaction ratio that was verified by an independent auditor per his blog Dude, did you just take their word for it? Have you seen the survey? Even if you take the number of bbb complaints and divide it by their alleged customer count you come up with a really small number but bigger than yours something like 22k to 1. parkwest even tried to convince wikipedia to include that ridiculously small percentage as fact but were denied . If you read further on the internet. we are not looking at only 5 dozen complaints but hundreds of complaints. so their customer satisfaction ratio drops to maybe 10k to one. still doesn't seem too bad. But what about this alleged customer list. are these truely all customers that purchased something .. nope, remember that bidder card you filled out? whether on ship or land? guess what, you are now a 'customer' How many people were at your auction, how many actually bought something maybe 10 percent? Now what are we looking at a customer base of what 130,000 actual customers, with a few hundred complaints now we are down to 433 to 1 a s customer satisfaction ratio. That is a far cry from their stated satisfaction ratio. That point is moot, I'd just love to see the verification (sorry al, you can't be the independent auditor you're not certifiable for that job .. but you could be certifiable for something else) so if you got it. post it, provide the name of the auditor , the company they represent (make it one of the big 5 firms please) and when they completed this 'verified audit' please no postdating. Stick it up on your website for all to see. Acme Accounting of Traverse City won't cut it either Oh yes, mr. postels crying about paid clickers. WTF are you talking about. have you got your head so far .. sorry, i just have a hard time dealing with ignorant people who claim to be experts. Ok .. paid clickers. we've got mr postel claiming (under one of his manly and not so manly aliases) that FAR's traffic and blog reads are as a resut of paid clickers. you can see him call them spammers (alas .. louie pulled that nonsense too)was herebut you can see it cached on the internet here .. ah, louie, spammers flood your inbox with stuff like .. notices of where and when the prodigious parkwest is going to be pandering posters and plying their dog and pony performance next .. and then send it out to like 1.2 million email addresses, that would be a spammer, not what you are describing. ok back to the numbers. It seems that louie has come up with some number regarding the traffic on http://www.fineartregistry.com in this blog that seems to be repeated under different names in a couple of locations they claim that FAR's traffic breaks down to the following numbers. United States 40.8% China 26.2% Australia 13.6% Philippines & Other countries 18.4% Ok, there are 3 ways to get this information from their website, or 4 if FAR decided to give it to them (as if they would). anyway here are the 3 ways louie and parkwest came up with the numbers: 1. Make them Up ... very plausible .. they make up lots of other numbers. 2. Break into their website/network and steal the logs for analysis. Oh that is a federal offense boys .. and it goes across state lines too .. you didn't do that did you? or 3. Rely on a source of information that tracks websites traffic like ALEXA so which one is it guys, make up, break in or have someone else guess for you and then state the results as fact? I actually know the answer .. you (aw shucks .. they deleted that too)provided it for me. You know louie, you should read the site better, if you did you would notice that alexa has some important disclaimers. 1. ...our traffic estimates may over- or under-estimate the actual traffic to any particular site 2. ...traffic data may also be adversely affected by our "site" definitions. With tens of millions of hosts on the Internet, our automated procedures for determining which hosts are serving the "same" content may be incorrect .. 3. Sites with relatively low traffic will not be accurately ranked by Alexa. Alexa's data comes from a large sample of several million Alexa Toolbar users ... 4. Generally, traffic rankings of 100,000 and above should be regarded as not reliable ok point by point, 1. alexa may be wrong. they are saying sorry up front. 2. alexa is claiming that their classifications might be wrong for a particular site but saying "our bad" and so might the traffic data. 3. low traffic, well, if they aren't in the top 100,000 sites, or pretty close to it, that is probably low traffic. As for Alexa tool bar users, How many of you readers have this tool installed on your computer/internet browser .. not I, so they aren't getting my data. and after reviewing my logs, of the 8,000+ visitors i've had, only two browsers showed that they had the tool bar installed. Hmm, yep great coverage, i guess they will have to guess on my traffic. 4. Site Ranking, let's take a look at that shall we? Fine Art Registry .. Site Rank 731,782 per alexa. So, results not reliable per alexa's own admission. How about my site .. well out of 120 billion websites (i've no clue how many there really are just making that number up but at least i am telling you the reader that and not trying to hide it) alexa ranks me as 16,937,387 .. i've got a long way to go to get to #1. How about parkwest .. alexa says .. sorry guys .. you are at 710,557 just barely more popular than Fine Art Registry. so sad, but at least you can rest assured that if you are using alexa's data to determine that someone is using paid clickers, the data from alexa is pretty much useless. Anyway, any really search engine experts disclaim alexa and their methods. check it out for yourself. manipulating-alexa-traffic-rankings for a few hundred dollars you can boost your rankings .. hey al, you wanna blow some more coin? experts find alexa's rankings questionable you go ahead and run with their number al .. i'd go with google. or a web analytics research calling alexa's data 'tremendously flawed' so louie, what were you saying about paid clickers? Still want to stand behind your numbers? Yeah, i thought as much. and please retain for future reference, spammers send annoying unsolicited email, paid clickers do not, just so you can keep that straight. So that you don't spam the carnival customer lists, carnival would be pissed to know that their customers were invited to a hotel auction. Other numbers .. hey what do you know about above reserve, below reserve, redline and parkwest framed prices? speaking of prices, why do appraisals for Canadian customers cost so much more than for US customers? The current exchange rate is. 0.973615 so, if it is 35.00 USD for US customers why is it 48.68 USD for Canadian customers to get an appraisal, is this just another revenue stream. does it cost an additional 13.68 to mail it across the border? They are also claiming that Fine Art Registry is the 600 pound gorilla in the room. Funny how the beached 10 ton whale is the one making all the noise hoping no one will notice. Oh another interesting tidbit. Parkwest and their supporters are claiming that park west has 1000+ employees. That is funny, I thought the vast majority were auctioneers. and aren't they independent contractors that you mostly nickel and dime too? so are they employees, or independent contractors. There is a difference between employees and IC's .. payroll issues, taxes, benefits and the like. think carefully before answering. I think that they have only maybe 300 actual employees, and I'll bet a majority (i've talked to a few of them) are not 'happy employees'. Have you been classifying your people correctly, if not .. that could come back and bite you in the arse. Oh, that's right. albert's step daughter is the HR director. I am sure that you'll be fine. Nicky? what is your degree in again? So what have we learned in this exercise? Well, we know how much a penchant parkwest has for using information, lies, statistics, scripture (al scag.) to support their position. they might as well make all of it up. I am not buying any of it. It comes back to the there are 'Lies, Damn Lies and Statistics' which I'll now rephrase as 'Lies, Damn Lies, Statistics and Park West Realities' I am sure that al baby must have been sleeping in his statistics classes to have missed this one. Maybe that is why he left engineering where facts and natural law rule, to a business where he can create the facts and rules.

Avarus animus nullo satiatur lucro.
Die dulci fruere.