Washington’s NFL franchise has a notoriously troubled relationship with the concepts of facts and honesty, but this—via the DC Sports Bog—is a pretty good one even by their standards:
With the help of third-party media monitoring services Meltwater and TVEyes, the team put out a fancy 13-page report on its findings. That report determined, among other things, that there were “7,845,460,401 unique visitors of print/online coverage of the 2014 Bon Secours Washington Redskins Training Camp from July 24-Aug. 12.” That’s a big number. To put it in perspective, that’s considerably more than the population of Earth, which the Census Bureau estimates at 7.26 billion.
“Unique visitors” are individual humans who saw a given site or page in a given time period. (Another way of capturing the absurdity of the team’s claim: It would mean that 2014 Washington training camp content was seen by six times as many people as Facebook has monthly worldwide users.)
The team’s PR firm says that the number “must have been incorrectly labeled” and actually refers to a metric called “impressions” that the firm, as SB Nation points out, is also using in a ludicrous and inaccurate way. The DC Sports Bog notes that the team said a year ago that 2.95 billion unique visitors had seen coverage of the 2013 training camp, an equally bogus claim which would seem to indicate that this year’s use of the term was not accidental.
