The furore that has erupted around Daily Telegraph editor Will Lewis citing research that proved his paper now has the biggest online audience in the UK serves to highlight the old saying that there are 'lies, damn lies and statistics.'
The claims were immediately challenged by both Times Online editor-in-chief Anne Spackman, who said that the there were issues with the methodology, and the Guardian's director of digital content Emily Bell, who argued that web statistics are "probably not as robust as they could be".
When it comes to measuring web site traffic there are certainly a large number of research firms - NielsenNetratings, comScore, HitWise and ABCe to name but a few.
It is generally accepted, as Ms Spackman pointed out, that despite the different methodologies used in the industry, the Telegraph website usually ranks fourth in the newspaper category.
Mr Lewis' claim, very selectively based on figures provided by internet research company HitWise, go awry on a few counts.
The stats from HitWise, which measures size in terms of market share based on numbers of visits over the course of a month, only related to a single web address www.telegraph.co.uk.
This means, for example, that traffic to relevant associated web domains relating to, say, sport, technology or media are not aggregated.
And the figures only relate to UK users (although the Telegraph is generally accepted to still only be fourth in size based on UK-only statistics from other companies) at a time when increasingly large foreign audiences have to be considered.
According to research firm Comscore 55% of Guardian Media Group's unique users are outside of the UK; 44% in the case of the Sun; 60% for Times Online and 44% for the Telegraph.
Comscore also puts the Telegraph in fourth place in terms of unique users for the month of October based on any metric - UK users, European users and globally.
It ranks the Guardian first, the Times second and the Sun third.
The Telegraph also has its figures officially audited by the online arm of the Audit Bureau of Circulation based on an analysis of unique users - that is a visitor is counted only once per month no matter how many visits are made - of its own server logs.
ABCe puts the Telegraph.co.uk at 5.9m unique users for August, the most recent month figures are publicly available.
ABCe figures for the Guardian for the month of October put it at more than double that of Mr Lewis' paper with 12.75m unique users; second is Times Online with 9m in the month of September followed by the Sun with 6.895m.
Nielsen/NetRatings, which uses a 4,000 person panel of UK users to measure unique users, also ranks the Telegraph as fourth largest website.
Some media owners, including the Guardian, which is obviously the publisher of this website, have taken issue with Nielsen's figures, although not trends, as appearing to be much smaller than internal company logs suggest.
Nielsen is planning to launch a new 40,000-strong panel to strengthen its figures.
Stuart Maxwell, Business Development Manager at ABCe, quite rightly argues that the best path to take is a combination of research data to build up the most solid picture of website usage.
Certainly if newspaper digital sales teams want to do more than embarrass themselves in front of increasingly-savvy agencies and clients it pays to come armed with more than a single, simplistic statistic.
