Niagara Falls Voted No. 1 in Flawed ContestSo-called USA Today 'Kid Friendly' contest requires online voters to vote more than once to select winners |
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Last week it was announced in the local media that "USA Today readers named Niagara Falls, N.Y. the best 'kid-friendly' destination as part of the newspaper's 10Best readers' choice travel award contest." This hopeful news sounds good at first until you dissect it a little. First of all, as clarification, it is not the general population of USA Today readers, with its print circulation of 1.8 million or its estimated 3.1 million daily readers, or even its estimated nearly one million daily internet readers, that chose Niagara Falls as the most kid friendly spot in America. The online contest was not hosted on USA Today's website, but on www.10best.com, which is the website of 10Best Inc. of Greenville, South Carolina. 10Best Inc. is a internet based company acquired by USA Today in Jan. 2013. The 10Best website features online contests about travel plus travel information and travel industry advertising. The 10Best "Kid-Friendly Destination" contest where Niagara Falls was voted number one is one of hundreds of similar contests that promote travel interest and traffic to the website by visitor interaction. In this contest, the website's editor assigned four "travel experts" Katie Dillon (La Jolla Mom), Kyle McCarthy (MyFamilyTravels.com), Eileen Ogintz (Taking the Kids) and Dave Parfitt (Adventures by Daddy) to nominate 20 destinations they thought were kid friendly. Then 10Best listed these 20 places and opened the contest up to online voting where any internet user can visit the site and click on the vote button and vote anonymously. In fact, by the rules, people are encouraged, if they want their favorite to have any chance of winning, to vote once every day for four weeks since the highest total votes cast over four weeks determines the winner. One can game the system since the only identification used when one votes in a 10Best contest is the browser "cookie" message sent to the 10Best website. A person who knows a little about computers, say such as some of those at the Niagara Tourism and Convention Center, can vote all day long on the same computer by a simple method requiring exactly six clicks with your mouse, if they are using Google Chrome, and five clicks, if using Internet Explorer, then going back to the website and voting again. The Reporter tried this experiment and voted multiple times in the space of an hour for the same contest - which was picked at random. Not to be a cookie buster, or to denigrate a site dedicated to travel and fun, but the results are not to be taken seriously and no one should deem them reliable. What this survey and its results speak to is the unreliability of internet contests where meaning is derived from so-many clicks and page visits, clicks and visits that at the end of the day have absolutely zero relationship to both the number of true visits to Niagara Falls and visitor satisfaction, much less children friendly visits. Online is where, depending on how clever the staff technological person is, we can become what we are not and even boast to the world about it. Saying it's so doesn't make it real. And trying to convince people that it is indeed real is a sign of the desperation driving the false notion that we are a friendly children's tourist destination. On the face of that claim we know it's not true. This isn't Disney World. This isn't Hawaii and it's not any one of a number of more action-filled and contemporary themed and child oriented vacation locations. In our gut we know this to be true and to say so doesn't demean the city or even the region. Let's not, in our hopes of becoming a genuine family oriented vacation destination, resort to ballot stuffing and online tourism measuring contests that signify nothing and matter less.
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