MADRID — On April 28, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez stood alone on the stage of a bright but empty briefing room. As a CNN reporter asked a question via video link, the prime minister looked deep in concentration, scribbling notes and pausing to look at the monitor only once. As he launched into his answer, he looked directly into the camera to boast about Spain’s Covid-19 testing volume.
“We are one of the countries with the highest number of tests carried out,” Sánchez said.
Initially, the prime minister cited data from a recent Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) ranking that had placed Spain eighth in Covid-19 testing among its members.
Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez takes reporters’ questions during a press teleconference on April 28, 2020. Credit: Palace of Moncloa
“Today,” he added, “we have found out about another study, from the Johns Hopkins University, that […] ranks us fifth in the world in total tests carried out.”
There were just two problems: The OECD data had been wrong. And while some sources had ranked Spain fifth in total testing volume, Johns Hopkins was not one of them; the study Sánchez cited does not exist.
Yet two weeks later, the Spanish government is standing by the substance of its prime minister’s claim. Instead of citing Johns Hopkins, Spanish officials are now pointing to testing rankings from a data aggregation website called Worldometer — one of the sources behind the university’s widely cited coronavirus dashboard — and prompting questions about why some governments and respected institutions have chosen to trust a source about which little is known.
The Covid-19 pandemic has boosted Worldometer’s popularity. In the past six months, its pages have been shared about 2.5 million times — up from just 65 shares in the first six months of 2019, according to statistics from BuzzSumo. Credit: Worldometer
What is Worldometer?
Before the pandemic, Worldometer was best known for its “counters,” which provided live estimates of numbers like the world’s population or the number of cars produced this year. Its website indicates that revenue comes from advertising and licensing its counters. The Covid-19 crisis has undoubtedly boosted the website’s popularity. It’s one of the top-ranking Google search results for coronavirus stats. In the past six months, Worldometer’s pages have been shared about 2.5 million times — up from just 65 shares in the first six months of 2019, according to statistics provided by BuzzSumo, a company that tracks social media engagement and provides insights into content.
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Questioning the reliability of this coronavirus statistics site 03: 36
The website claims to be “run by an international team of developers, researchers, and volunteers” and “published by a small and independent digital media company based in the United States.”
But public records show little evidence of a company that employs a multilingual team of analysts and researchers. It’s not clear whether the company has paid staff vetting its data for accuracy or whether it relies solely on automation and crowdsourcing. The site does have at least one job posting, from October, seeking a volunteer web developer.
Once known as Worldometers, the website was originally created in 2004 by Andrey Alimetov, then a 20-year-old recent immigrant from Russia who had just gotten his first IT job in New York.
“It’s a super simple website, there is nothing crazy about it,” he recently told CNN.
Within about a year, Alimetov said, the site was getting 20,000 or 30,000 visits every day but costing him too much money in web-hosting fees.
“There was no immediate fast way to cash out,” he said, so he listed the site on eBay and sold it for $2,000 sometime in 2005 or 2006.
Changing hands
When Reddit’s homepage featured Worldometer in 2013, its founder emailed the new owner, a man named Dario, to congratulate him. Dario said he bought the site to drive traffic to his other websites.
Source: Andrey Alimetov
When Reddit’s homepage featured his old site in 2013, Alimetov emailed the buyer, a man named Dario, to congratulate him.
In his reply, Dario said he bought the site to drive traffic to his other websites.