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#the-numbers — Public Fediverse posts

Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #the-numbers, aggregated by home.social.

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  1. “Barbarians at the gate”*…

    Times have changed. As the New York Times reports (in a piece apposite to Tuesday’s post)…

    When Google prepared to go public in 2004, Larry Page, a co-founder of the company, wrote a letter to shareholders describing the internet firm’s responsibility to the world.

    “We believe a well-functioning society should have abundant, free and unbiased access to high-quality information,” Mr. Page said.

    Google fulfilled that responsibility by acting as a gateway to the internet. It answered people’s search queries with lists of hyperlinks, pushing users out to what is known as the “open web” — the millions of websites run by merchants, publishers, universities and others — for more information. In the ensuing decades, Google became one of the planet’s richest and most powerful companies by directing people to the vastness of the open web.

    Now in the age of artificial intelligence, Google appears to be shrinking back from the open web — and may be imperiling it.

    Since last year, the Silicon Valley giant has revamped its search with A.I. It introduced AI Mode, which replaces search results of hyperlinks with conversational responses written by Gemini, its A.I. chatbot. Most recently, Google changed its iconic search box for the first time in 25 years so that people could add photos and videos to their queries and assign A.I. “agents” to run searches for them.

    The effect of these moves is becoming clear: People are spending more time with Google than ever…

    – gift article

    … and spending less time with the sites that supply the information Google’s AI returns. Stephen Follows unpacks one web site’s experience– a cautionary tale for the open web and a reminder that, if we kill the sites generating the answers on which we depend, they won’t be there for anyone (directly or via AI) to find…

    If you work in or around the film industry, there is a decent chance you have used the work of The Numbers this month, whether you realise it or not.

    Its hand-researched data is the highest quality, tracking box office grosses, budgets, home video and streaming across more than 78,000 films and 236,000 people. It gets north of eight million visitors a year, and is treated as THE definitive authority by journalists, academics, filmmakers, prediction markets, and even Guinness World Records.

    And it was this GOAT status which caused the catastrophic events of March this year.

    On the 5th March 2026, TheNumbers.com website vanished.

    The site was down for over a week, without explanation. A week later, it resurfaced at a fraction of its former size. Gone were the historical charts, the individual movie pages, and even the much-loved Report Builder.

    With only a generic “we’re rebuilding, please bear with us” message to go on, the internet responded as it always does – with confusion, anger, and conspiracy theories.
    One Reddit theory even suggested it was a deliberate rug pull designed to cripple the free site to push people towards paid products.

    Three months on, I spoke at length with Bruce Nash, founder and CEO of The Numbers, about what happened. He describes quite an unpleasant and eventful experience:

    We got a lot of angry emails from people who are like, ‘Where’s this page that you used to have and you don’t have anymore?’

    Within his tale are a number of things that should worry anyone who runs, relies on, or simply appreciates the internet…

    [Follows recounts the history of The Numbers: its launch on Geocities, its growth, the onslaught of robots, the attack of hackers, and the coming of the LLMs and their relentless scraping…

    … How bad could [AI bot scraping] be? Pretty bad, tbh. Enough that site owners such as Bruce have to question the value of something that will take so much time and money to build and defend.

    Cloudflare, which protects a huge share of the world’s websites, publishes data on how many pages each AI platform crawls for every one visitor it sends back to the websites it crawled.

    Google crawls about five pages for every visitor it sends you. OpenAI crawls over 1,000. Anthropic crawls over 38,000 pages for every single visitor it refers.

    Note that the scale is logarithmic, i.e. each step along the bottom is ten times bigger than the last, because otherwise the differences are quite literally too large for me to include on one chart.

    For the history of the internet to date, the principle of the open web was that, in return for letting the search engine robots read your site, they would send you readers. But now, that trade no longer applies. The number of robots has exploded, and they no longer send anyone back.

    When this firehose is aimed at a small site, it can inflate the bandwidth bill and possibly even take down an entire site…

    [Follows looks at other sites, including Wikipedia, in similar straights, and at attempts to protect these sites…]

    … Whether any of this works depends on whether the AI companies play along rather than route around it. But as Bruce put it to me, somebody has to try.

    Let’s look beyond the specifics for a moment and consider what happened here.

    A beloved, useful, free website, run carefully by a competent, honest person for nearly thirty years, was crushed between two features of the new AI economy.

    Unsustainable machine traffic hammered it from above, and in all likelihood a financially motivated intruder, operating in a world where breaking into websites has never been easier, took it down.

    Bruce’s business and livelihood survived only because the website was not the whole business.

    Others have not been so fortunate. Just last week, ZEGO, a German textile firm that had been in business for 37 years, filed for insolvency after a single cyberattack in March shut down its production for six weeks. Unlike The Numbers, they had no other business to fall back on.

    The web is full of independent archives, hobby databases, local news sites, forums, reference works. Decades of accumulated human effort, running on old code, maintained by small teams or single individuals, quietly holding up far more of our shared knowledge than anyone acknowledges.

    The Numbers is coming back, better built than before. I would encourage you to keep using it, keep supporting it, and, if you are one of the many people who emailed Bruce in fury about a missing page, perhaps send a kinder one now you know why it was missing…

    AI is eating our seed corn: “What just happened to TheNumbers.com should worry us all,” from @stephenfollows.com.

    (Image at top: source)

    * idiom

    ###

    As we conserve our culture, we might spare a thought for Vladimir Zworykin; he died on this date in 1982. An engineer and inventor, he is considered “the father of television” (or at least one of them). At the dawn of radio broadcasting, Zworykin began developing a system for transmitting sound and pictures. Other inventors were using a motorized, mechanical scanning system with rotating disks capable of a picture about one inch square– bulky, heavy, and impractical for home use. Zworykin, at Westinghouse, instead developed an electronic scanning television system using cathode-ray tubes; his innovations– among them, the iconoscope (the forerunner of the television camera) and the kinescope (which allowed the transfer of video to film)– laid the technical foundation for television as we came to know it… and contributed to the development of the electron microscope.

    source

    #AI #artificialIntelligence #broadcasting #culture #electronMicroscope #history #Internet #openWeb #Science #society #StephenFollows #Technology #television #TheNumbers #VladimirZworykin
  2. “Barbarians at the gate”*…

    Times have changed. As the New York Times reports (in a piece apposite to Tuesday’s post)…

    When Google prepared to go public in 2004, Larry Page, a co-founder of the company, wrote a letter to shareholders describing the internet firm’s responsibility to the world.

    “We believe a well-functioning society should have abundant, free and unbiased access to high-quality information,” Mr. Page said.

    Google fulfilled that responsibility by acting as a gateway to the internet. It answered people’s search queries with lists of hyperlinks, pushing users out to what is known as the “open web” — the millions of websites run by merchants, publishers, universities and others — for more information. In the ensuing decades, Google became one of the planet’s richest and most powerful companies by directing people to the vastness of the open web.

    Now in the age of artificial intelligence, Google appears to be shrinking back from the open web — and may be imperiling it.

    Since last year, the Silicon Valley giant has revamped its search with A.I. It introduced AI Mode, which replaces search results of hyperlinks with conversational responses written by Gemini, its A.I. chatbot. Most recently, Google changed its iconic search box for the first time in 25 years so that people could add photos and videos to their queries and assign A.I. “agents” to run searches for them.

    The effect of these moves is becoming clear: People are spending more time with Google than ever…

    – gift article

    … and spending less time with the sites that supply the information Google’s AI returns. Stephen Follows unpacks one web site’s experience– a cautionary tale for the open web and a reminder that, if we kill the sites generating the answers on which we depend, they won’t be there for anyone (directly or via AI) to find…

    If you work in or around the film industry, there is a decent chance you have used the work of The Numbers this month, whether you realise it or not.

    Its hand-researched data is the highest quality, tracking box office grosses, budgets, home video and streaming across more than 78,000 films and 236,000 people. It gets north of eight million visitors a year, and is treated as THE definitive authority by journalists, academics, filmmakers, prediction markets, and even Guinness World Records.

    And it was this GOAT status which caused the catastrophic events of March this year.

    On the 5th March 2026, TheNumbers.com website vanished.

    The site was down for over a week, without explanation. A week later, it resurfaced at a fraction of its former size. Gone were the historical charts, the individual movie pages, and even the much-loved Report Builder.

    With only a generic “we’re rebuilding, please bear with us” message to go on, the internet responded as it always does – with confusion, anger, and conspiracy theories.
    One Reddit theory even suggested it was a deliberate rug pull designed to cripple the free site to push people towards paid products.

    Three months on, I spoke at length with Bruce Nash, founder and CEO of The Numbers, about what happened. He describes quite an unpleasant and eventful experience:

    We got a lot of angry emails from people who are like, ‘Where’s this page that you used to have and you don’t have anymore?’

    Within his tale are a number of things that should worry anyone who runs, relies on, or simply appreciates the internet…

    [Follows recounts the history of The Numbers: its launch on Geocities, its growth, the onslaught of robots, the attack of hackers, and the coming of the LLMs and their relentless scraping…

    … How bad could [AI bot scraping] be? Pretty bad, tbh. Enough that site owners such as Bruce have to question the value of something that will take so much time and money to build and defend.

    Cloudflare, which protects a huge share of the world’s websites, publishes data on how many pages each AI platform crawls for every one visitor it sends back to the websites it crawled.

    Google crawls about five pages for every visitor it sends you. OpenAI crawls over 1,000. Anthropic crawls over 38,000 pages for every single visitor it refers.

    Note that the scale is logarithmic, i.e. each step along the bottom is ten times bigger than the last, because otherwise the differences are quite literally too large for me to include on one chart.

    For the history of the internet to date, the principle of the open web was that, in return for letting the search engine robots read your site, they would send you readers. But now, that trade no longer applies. The number of robots has exploded, and they no longer send anyone back.

    When this firehose is aimed at a small site, it can inflate the bandwidth bill and possibly even take down an entire site…

    [Follows looks at other sites, including Wikipedia, in similar straights, and at attempts to protect these sites…]

    … Whether any of this works depends on whether the AI companies play along rather than route around it. But as Bruce put it to me, somebody has to try.

    Let’s look beyond the specifics for a moment and consider what happened here.

    A beloved, useful, free website, run carefully by a competent, honest person for nearly thirty years, was crushed between two features of the new AI economy.

    Unsustainable machine traffic hammered it from above, and in all likelihood a financially motivated intruder, operating in a world where breaking into websites has never been easier, took it down.

    Bruce’s business and livelihood survived only because the website was not the whole business.

    Others have not been so fortunate. Just last week, ZEGO, a German textile firm that had been in business for 37 years, filed for insolvency after a single cyberattack in March shut down its production for six weeks. Unlike The Numbers, they had no other business to fall back on.

    The web is full of independent archives, hobby databases, local news sites, forums, reference works. Decades of accumulated human effort, running on old code, maintained by small teams or single individuals, quietly holding up far more of our shared knowledge than anyone acknowledges.

    The Numbers is coming back, better built than before. I would encourage you to keep using it, keep supporting it, and, if you are one of the many people who emailed Bruce in fury about a missing page, perhaps send a kinder one now you know why it was missing…

    AI is eating our seed corn: “What just happened to TheNumbers.com should worry us all,” from @stephenfollows.com.

    (Image at top: source)

    * idiom

    ###

    As we conserve our culture, we might spare a thought for Vladimir Zworykin; he died on this date in 1982. An engineer and inventor, he is considered “the father of television” (or at least one of them). At the dawn of radio broadcasting, Zworykin began developing a system for transmitting sound and pictures. Other inventors were using a motorized, mechanical scanning system with rotating disks capable of a picture about one inch square– bulky, heavy, and impractical for home use. Zworykin, at Westinghouse, instead developed an electronic scanning television system using cathode-ray tubes; his innovations– among them, the iconoscope (the forerunner of the television camera) and the kinescope (which allowed the transfer of video to film)– laid the technical foundation for television as we came to know it… and contributed to the development of the electron microscope.

    source

    #AI #artificialIntelligence #broadcasting #culture #electronMicroscope #history #Internet #openWeb #Science #society #StephenFollows #Technology #television #TheNumbers #VladimirZworykin
  3. #TheNumbers

    👉 “Right now, the team is having to reconsider what a public website even means in 2026”

    - When the GNOME open-source project measured its traffic, roughly 97% turned out to be bots.
    - A university library banned 16K IP addresses in 48 hours to keep its catalogue online.
    - Read the Docs, a non-profit that hosts docum. for open-source software, who watched a single crawler download 73 terabytes of zipped HTML in one month, costing it over $5K in bandwidth

    stephenfollows.com/p/what-just

  4. #TheNumbers

    👉 “Right now, the team is having to reconsider what a public website even means in 2026”

    - When the GNOME open-source project measured its traffic, roughly 97% turned out to be bots.
    - A university library banned 16K IP addresses in 48 hours to keep its catalogue online.
    - Read the Docs, a non-profit that hosts docum. for open-source software, who watched a single crawler download 73 terabytes of zipped HTML in one month, costing it over $5K in bandwidth

    stephenfollows.com/p/what-just

  5. I was listening to #TheNumbers podcast yesterday. They discussed an Abacus poll about #PierrePoilievre . Apparently, among voters who were open to voting for the #CPC, there were ~20% who disapproved of Mr. Poilievre. On the other hand, a poll by Environics asked whether voters would support the #CPC with other potential leaders: Melissa Lantsman, Doug Ford, Jason Kenney, Tim Houston, etc.

    Notwithstanding the high unfavourability level of Mr. Poilievre, all the other names did worse.

    #CanPol

  6. I was listening to #TheNumbers podcast yesterday. They discussed an Abacus poll about #PierrePoilievre . Apparently, among voters who were open to voting for the #CPC, there were ~20% who disapproved of Mr. Poilievre. On the other hand, a poll by Environics asked whether voters would support the #CPC with other potential leaders: Melissa Lantsman, Doug Ford, Jason Kenney, Tim Houston, etc.

    Notwithstanding the high unfavourability level of Mr. Poilievre, all the other names did worse.

    #CanPol

  7. Listening to #TheNumbers podcast, I heard #PhilippeJFournier and #ÉricGrenier saying that the modern #ConservativeParty is not what it used to be, even in Stephen Harper's time. They bring up polling on how #CPC voters feel about the monarchy: youtu.be/u2CIOSrC0pI?t=617

    I suspect this is a mismatch between voters and the party, that the membership and leadership remain solidly attached to Canadian traditions. I'll have a better feel for whether the party has changed in January.

    #CanPol #cdnpoli

  8. Listening to #TheNumbers podcast, I heard #PhilippeJFournier and #ÉricGrenier saying that the modern #ConservativeParty is not what it used to be, even in Stephen Harper's time. They bring up polling on how #CPC voters feel about the monarchy: youtu.be/u2CIOSrC0pI?t=617

    I suspect this is a mismatch between voters and the party, that the membership and leadership remain solidly attached to Canadian traditions. I'll have a better feel for whether the party has changed in January.

    #CanPol #cdnpoli

  9. J'écoute de temps en temps les discussions entre #ÉricGrenier et #PhilippeJFournier sur les sondages politiques au Canada. Aujourd'hui, entre autres sujets, ils parlent de l'avenir de la #CAQ. Selon eux, la différence entre les notes favorables et défavorables pour #FrançoisLegault est de -67 %, la pire qu'ils aient jamais vue pour un politicien canadien.

    youtube.com/watch?v=4Jo03kVOGp

    #polqc #TheNumbers #LesChiffres

  10. J'écoute de temps en temps les discussions entre #ÉricGrenier et #PhilippeJFournier sur les sondages politiques au Canada. Aujourd'hui, entre autres sujets, ils parlent de l'avenir de la #CAQ. Selon eux, la différence entre les notes favorables et défavorables pour #FrançoisLegault est de -67 %, la pire qu'ils aient jamais vue pour un politicien canadien.

    youtube.com/watch?v=4Jo03kVOGp

    #polqc #TheNumbers #LesChiffres

  11. I'm quite aware that this could affect the dopamine hit I get from #TheNumbers going up on Mixcloud, but I'm now also uploading each episode of #ThePlaylist to my new online archive.

    The quality's better, and you can add it to your favourite podcast app so you can listen on the go.

    djdarren.site/archive/podcast/

    mendeddrum.org/@DJDarren/11497

  12. I'm quite aware that this could affect the dopamine hit I get from #TheNumbers going up on Mixcloud, but I'm now also uploading each episode of #ThePlaylist to my new online archive.

    The quality's better, and you can add it to your favourite podcast app so you can listen on the go.

    djdarren.site/archive/podcast/

    mendeddrum.org/@DJDarren/11497

  13. The fact #TheNumbers is predicting a weekend #boxoffice haul of over $20 million for #Terrifier3 is WILD!

    A 2.5 hour excessive gore exploitation film making that kind of money was not something I'd expect.

  14. The fact #TheNumbers is predicting a weekend #boxoffice haul of over $20 million for #Terrifier3 is WILD!

    A 2.5 hour excessive gore exploitation film making that kind of money was not something I'd expect.

  15. #ThursdayFiveList is songs with #theNumbers, apparently. So without further ado, the first to come into my head:

    New Model Army - 51st State of America

    The Stooges - 1969

    Marillion - Man of A Thousand Faces

    PWEI - Def Con One

    Skid Row - 18 And Life

  16. Okay, being a #Sabaton fan, this week's #ThursdayFiveList hosted by @neurothing asking for #TheNumbers is easy.

    82nd All The Way (from The Great War), actually one my favorite songs by Sabaton
    youtube.com/watch?v=ZgfCUxFE7X

    Soldier Of 3 Armies (from Heroes) with epic drumming!!
    youtube.com/watch?v=QD-sLewK22

    Hill 3234 (from The Last Stand)
    youtube.com/watch?v=K1XkpvX-PJ

    1648 (from Carolus Rex)
    youtube.com/watch?v=NpVvM-PtEa

    7 Pillars of Wisdom (from The Great War)
    youtube.com/watch?v=P_Igr355iV

  17. Okay, being a #Sabaton fan, this week's #ThursdayFiveList hosted by @neurothing asking for #TheNumbers is easy.

    82nd All The Way (from The Great War), actually one my favorite songs by Sabaton
    youtube.com/watch?v=ZgfCUxFE7X

    Soldier Of 3 Armies (from Heroes) with epic drumming!!
    youtube.com/watch?v=QD-sLewK22

    Hill 3234 (from The Last Stand)
    youtube.com/watch?v=K1XkpvX-PJ

    1648 (from Carolus Rex)
    youtube.com/watch?v=NpVvM-PtEa

    7 Pillars of Wisdom (from The Great War)
    youtube.com/watch?v=P_Igr355iV

  18. #ThursdayFiveList #TheNumbers from @neurothing

    The Coup – Land of 7 Billion Dances (get poppin')
    youtu.be/QC142oEXXR8?si=-2syqB

    Young Pioneers – Seven Days in May (Put on your red dress, baby! The barricades are in the streets!)
    youngpioneers1.bandcamp.com/tr

    Husker Du – Eight Miles High (circle pit to a Byrds song)
    youtu.be/SrkSAnuBkQc?si=HuSVBw

    Great Cynics – Twenty Five (great clapalong)
    coffeeandcigarettesclothingco.

    Today is the Day – My First Knife (hell yeah, baby)
    todayistheday.bandcamp.com/tra

  19. This week for @neurothing's #ThursdayFiveList, its all about #TheNumbers

    Not everything is on Songwhip, but here's an all K-Pop/K-Hip Hop list

    BYUL (별) "12월 32일"
    youtube.com/watch?v=RnBGzPTA47

    Lee Hyori "10 Minutes"
    songwhip.com/leehyori/10-minut

    Dynamic Duo "동전 한 닢 Remix (One Penny)"
    youtube.com/watch?v=dy4XKXaZ5o

    Drunken Tiger "8:45 Heaven"
    songwhip.com/drunkentiger/845-

    PSY "Year of 77"
    songwhip.com/psy/year-of-77

    #KPop