A favourite game being played these days seems to involve making up numbers. Some examples?

Well how about the Yuku/ezboard DEMOfall 2005 presentation, which states that (as at September 2005):

“…Yuku has more than 14 million registered users and 500,000 communities. Yuku is growing by more than 200,000 registered users and 6,000 communities a month….”

Except at that stage, despite them saying that Yuku was “available today”, it was a closed beta (or really, closed alpha) and had but a very small number of users, certainly far less than the 14,000,000 users claimed. Note also that Yuku was claimed to be growing at 200,000+ users a month at that time, not just getting 200,000 new users and losing a few - growing. Wow! So by now, they’d have, what, another 2,400,000 users, wouldn’t they, totalling 16,400,000?

Hmm. Maybe not. Anyone remember this post by the Yuku Blogger himself, Mr. Rob “proudly powered by WordPress” Labatt on 29 June 2006:

“I’d like to thank the over 25,000 ezboarders who have gone to Yuku!”

Ah. So not quite the 14,000,000 Yuku registered users he’d claimed back in September the year before?

Still, 25,000 ezboard users now on Yuku is still an achievement. How many? Ah, well according to the Yuku Wikipedia entry so carefully written by ezboard staffer, Regimemachine (aka Brian James), that might be “factually inaccurate” too:

“As of September 1, 2006, internal stats show that almost 15,000 [1] members of the ezboard community have voluntarily begun beta testing the Yuku product.”

Go on! Follow the link in there to Yuku’s Developer Blog, where he states on 7 September 2006 that:

“First off, I’d like to mention that Yuku has recieved almost 15,000 user imports from our ezboard users. That’s huge and I’d like to thank everyone for trying out Yuku and for all of your input.”

Excellent stuff, but, er, isn’t 15,000 less than 1% of the claimed ezboard userbase? And isn’t 15,000 somewhat less than the 25,000 his boss had claimed were on board less than two months previously?

Surely ezboard, Inc. wouldn’t release completely inaccurate or inflated user figures for some unknown reason? Would they?