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from the all-the-ones-that-are-not-dead-yet? dept.
How many 18-34 year old people live in the US?
Facebook tells advertisers that they can reach up to 41 million users in the 18-24 age bracket. Sounds reasonable... However, one stock analyst (who unlike most analysts, has a "SELL" rating for Facebook shares) noticed that there are only 31 million people in the country in that age bracket (according to the Census Bureau.)
On the one hand, the Census Bureau has decades of experience coming up with scientifically accurate population estimates based on birth and death rates, immigration rates, representative surveys, and even literally going door to door and counting people.
On the other hand, Facebook data is both specific and granular. Users provide their birthdays, and Facebook captures where you log in from. So the company knows if you’re inside the boundaries of the U.S., and it knows how old you are.
Of course, in the advertising world, if a person doesn't exist how can you reach them?
Also reported by Reuters
Facebook Offering Access to more US Customers Than Actually Exist (Claims Analyst)
Spotted on The Register is an article on claims about the unreliability of Facebook's advertising statistics:
Facebook has an extensive and sophisticated ad-buying system that assures potential advertisers it can reach no fewer than 41 million of a core target group of 18 to 24-year-olds in the United States.
The only problem, analyst Brian Wieser of Pivotal Research Group pointed out in a note to customers, is that there are only 31 million of them that actually exist in the US, according to the official census data. The same gap in reality also holds for other groups, including the next most-targeted group of 25 to 34-year-olds.
(Score: 1) by kurenai.tsubasa on Sunday September 10 2017, @08:32PM
Oh please, not more anti-Thubani disinformation. Yes, it's true they have very advanced medical and biological knowledge, and it's part of their standard procedure when guiding life forms that haven't evolved culturally and technologically to political organization on the scale of a star system to use their technology to assume the appearance of the natives.
Just ask yourself this, though. Why would a people advanced enough to be operating 300 light years away from the system they evolved in rely on something that doesn't even make sense like reprocessing deceased members of the host civilization into its own food supply?! How would that even help them? Their human skins rely on the same nutrients that may be found in plant and animal sources just like us humans do. Given their perspective on humanity, being millions of years more evolved than humans, many of them even have reservations about eating cows, pigs, and many other large mammals, preferring a vegetarian diet with fish, plenty of insects, and phosphorus supplements. (The Earth's biosphere is phosphorus-poor compared to their native environment on the now barren Thuban d.)
They don't view the old wonderful sausage creepy trope that much differently from humans. Of course, Thubani culture has its own wonderful sausage trope, which I might be able to loosely translate as “wonderful grasshopper-loaf.” Same idea. An insect baker loses his temper with his mate one night and chops them up. Unsure what to do with the body and afraid of being found out, the baker grinds up the body and uses it in his grasshopper-loaf. He soon gains fame thanks to his “wonderful grasshopper-loaf.” Depending on how the person telling the story is feeling, sometimes the baker gets caught, and sometimes they don't.
As for the regeneration thing, regeneration of the human skin is generally only necessary once in the recipient's lifetime, though I'm not going to pretend that some don't undergo it once every few Earth years. (Yeah, I know, travel light years from the nearest inhabited system just to aspire to something as banal as a movie star, though I don't mind Keanu Reeves' work.) The average Thubani life span is 140 Earth years, and they typically get it done around age 70 or 80 around the time their human skin begins to show problems due to old age. The procedure takes a little over a month.