Harry Shannon
I was looking for information on electric vehicles (EVs). Through our local library, I saw the May 2022 edition of BBC Top Gear magazine. The front page promised ‘THE ELECTRIC AWARDS.’
The table of contents included ‘Reader’s Choice’ and went on: ‘Did you choose your favourite in the poll to end all polls. TG readers voted in their dozens. Time to find out what won.’
Poll to end all polls?! Based on dozens of votes? When they wrote ‘dozens’ I wondered just how many that might be. I assumed that if there had been 200 or more, they would have claimed that ‘hundreds’ of readers voted. So they must have had less than 200 votes.
Now I decided to find out how many people read Top Gear. The numbers varied a lot. Statista.com wrote that the magazine’s average monthly reach (presumably that means readership) from April 2019 to March 2020 was 1.4 million. ABC (Audit Bureau of Circulation) gave the average circulation (paper and online copies) in 2021 as 58,941.
Let’s go with the lower figure for circulation and the maximum for votes in the poll: 200 votes from nearly 60,000 copies, just 1 in 300 (0.3%). And that’s the most optimistic estimate. 200 votes from a reach of 1.4 million is only 1 in 7,000! Put another way, the poll and the article about it are completely meaningless.
‘Poll to end all polls’? That may be more accurate than they intended. If every poll got this sort of response rate, it would mean an end to polls.