Certain corporations and organizations love to claim anything and everything as “lost revenue”. I know I’ve complained about this earlier, but it seems that the style of reporting isn’t going away and, what’s worse, media and politicians are being dragged into this deceptive play of numbers.
Using a simple but fundamentally flawed logic of “one download = one lost CD album purchase”, we’ve become accustomed to hearing ridiculous claims from the likes of MPAA and RIAA, with large parts of the media repeating their propaganda unfiltered. Now that kind of reporting is advancing into new domains, as witnessed by this headline in a normally good-quality and supposedly independent industry report:
Cellcos lose millions from users’ reluctance to forward photos, videos.
The logic behind that headline is that operators lose money from the fact that people are not forwarding the photos they take with their cellphones to their friends via MMS. That falls right into the category of the dumbest (il)logical constructions I’ve heard. It’s truly incredible how some have the audacity to try to pin the blame on users for not wanting to use some lame services. Maybe, just maybe, there’s some faults with the service itself? Or the provider? Or the cost-benefit ratio?
By the exact same logic I’m losing thousands of euros every day from people not donating me money.
While nobody would take that assertion seriously, the logic really is the same: it’s a brilliant business case for me (“the operator”) but a terrible, expensive and a rather disappointing use case for those paying for it (“the customers”).
