Motherboard article uses energy of 10 American houses

Since Motherboard avoided questioning whether their calculations would actually lead to a meaningful result, I set out to proof that a calculation as the one Motherboard conducted can result in an equally click-generating, but meaningless results if you just play around with numbers long enough.

130 watts/hour divided by 60 minutes * 4 minutes = 8.7 watts

1.033.826 visitors per day * 8.7 watts = 8.994.286,2 watts per day

9.000kw / ( 901kwh / month ) ~ 10 per month

Thus, our play with numbers lead to the astonishing result that the Motherboard article uses per day as much energy as 10 average American houses per month!

Now, I am sure that you could already point out a few shortcomings of this calculation and that’s exactly the point. Playing with numbers can be fun and lead to surprising results, but it’s always up to the author to decide whether the result is actually meaningful and whether or not to put it in an article on a website that has around 1 million unique users per day. I certainly would think twice before doing such a thing.

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