Netizen Fact Checks 8Days.sg’s Alleged 2.1 Million Page Views Monthly

A discerning netizen has called out 8 Days for inflating their monthly page views in a Channel NewsAsia article released on Thursday (12 Apr).

He commented on CNA’s Facebook post boosting their article which revealed that 8days.sg attracted “an average of 2.1 million page views a month”.

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Let’s take a closer look at the smackdowns laid by a data-savvy netizen — to find out if his suspicion that the stats have been “fudged” are credible or not.

Suspicions were raised

CNA’s original article was intended to announce 8 Days permanent move to the digital platform.

But an eagle-eyed netizen zoomed in on this particular statistic about 8days.sg’s monthly page views — 2.1 million to be exact.

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Mr Lee disputed the statistic based on SimilarWeb’s statistics — a website which calls itself the “world’s greatest database of digital behaviour”.

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He suggested that 8days.sg did an approximate 1.5 million page views instead.

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And tagged CNA in a subsequent comment to do some “fact check(ing)” with 8 Days for their article.

Lo and behold, this warranted a reply from 8 Days themselves.

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8 Days countered that they subscribed to a “tagging system from Adobe Analytics” — which they attributed the result of 2.1 million monthly page views solely to.

8 Days clarified that SimilarWeb – which Mr Lee used – was a freemium site that only “uses estimations”.

Data smackdown delivered

Little did they know that Kenneth did actually seem to know his stuff.

As evidenced by his lengthy response in return.

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Kenneth explains that Adobe Analytics is a platform to look at their website’s data — similar to Google Analytics.

He pulled his stats from SimilarWeb, which revealed a shockingly different stat altogether.

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SimilarWeb – the freemium site which 8 Days disputed – is used by major websites and companies to provide “serious market intelligence”, according to Mr Lee.

He elaborated that the stats may be off by a few percentage points, but not by a few hundred thousand page views.

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To add fuel to fire, he pulled up Amazon-backed Alexa’s ranking, to prove that 8 Days “doesn’t even rank [within] the top 50” sites in Singapore.

Finally he issued a checklist for 8 Days to complete:

Find out their real page view count Update the stat in CNA’s article Share their partial analytics data to prove their case Log their data with SimilarWeb if it’s inaccurate

The knockout blow?

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Mr Lee placed the onus on 8 Days to prove its 2.1 million page view count.

Or risk having advertisers worry about spending ad dollars on their site.

Unaccounted views via 8 Days app?

It’s possible that there could be page views unaccounted for in 8 Days’s android app, which has 1000+ downloads on Google Play.



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Only, the app doesn’t seem to have been updated since last year.

What about the iOS version you may ask?

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8 Days ranks #90 in the ‘Magazines & Newspapers’ category and costs $44.99 for a one-year subscription.

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Perhaps the paywall acts as an incentive to encourage their users to stay on their site?

The mystery remains.

Irony hits home hard

Since 8 Days has closed its print department, we would expect that they’ll be welcoming advertisers to their digital site with open arms.

However, as this vigilant netizen has pointed out, it would require solid evidence to prove their case.

Let us know in the comments if you’re regular readers of 8 Days, and what you think of the stats provided.

Featured image from Facebook and 8days.sg and Channel NewsAsia.