Guys, I think this is just measuring social media and forum discussion activity.
Thus, it would kind of make sense for Wii U to be in the lead because, you know, it actually has games out for it?
Nope, it only measures comments made on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and Google+.
Comments get influenced by how many likes, upvotes, retweets, etc., the comments get, and also "what the sentiment of the comment is."
"Positive" comments increase the score, while "negative" comments decrease it.
I don't see the cause for so many histrionic reactions. It's a fairly harmless measurement of social media mentions, and doesn't really pretend to be anything more in the write-up. There certainly is no pretense to have any relation to sales. It is a little interesting to see that mentions of the Wii U went up recently, whether in positive or negative contexts, and companies watch this kind of social media aggregation more than you think.
It's a comical, minor, and somewhat perplexing blip in social media. I'd have expected only lighthearted speculation here over what might have spurred so many people to mention the system online recently.
It's harmful for three reasons:
1) It's founded on nebulous, esoteric data from only 5 sites across the web. Imagine all of the false positives, garbage data, inflated data, or potentially manipulated data this tracker could hold...the fundamentals behind this kind of tracking are so fuzzy that it's pointless to attempt such an endeavor.
2) The results are misleading due to questionable methods of data gathering and a lack of transparency. GDEX somehow "shows" that Wii U is being as talked about as PS4 or Xbox One across the Internet. What if that's completely untrue---after all, the Internet is bigger than just 5 social media websites. Why can't we have raw numbers of mentions? Why does it have to be formulated into a "point" system? Why can't we see the logic behind the point system? Why are there so many secrets?
3) It's self-important. The site goes around touting its "500 million analyzed comments per day!" statistic as if it has some kind of authority. Don't mind the fact that it only looks at comments from five websites, or the fact that it has no transparency in its sources. We can't in good faith look at the tracker and consider it as anything other than light-hearted and comical. If we try to take it seriously we run into too many problems that contradict its validity and usefulness.
