UPDATED: June 16, 2012
This is a favorite tweet from Avinash Kaushik sent back in 2010: The idea is a that averages mask the characteristic of your audience. Take a group of 5 people. You give everyone except the fifth person a Euro. Person number five receives 10 Euros. The average is 2.80 Euros. But that average is not the characteristic of the group -- most have 1 Euro, and the fifth person's amount distorts what each individual has.
This is the point behind the tweet, and the idea behind some of the data examined. Yes, there are average time on site, but for other qualities of a group, a mean and mode would give a more precise idea of the the group composition.
For more of this statistics in action, check out Avinash's Tweet. "Don't be Mr Average. Why averages are a bad, bad thing in Digital Marketing." http://zqi.me/aXWFHD Read. Learn. Live.
