In the wake of the controversy over He Who Must Not Be Linked and his article, “Don’t Marry Career Women,” the NYT can’t resist the opportunity to take a shot at the competition: “At Forbes.com, Lots of Glitter but Maybe Not So Many Visitors“:

Forbes.com, the online sibling of Forbes magazine and part of Forbes Inc., is more accustomed to delivering the news than being the news. And despite last week’s dust-up, it is adept at it. Even as Forbes magazine has declined in advertising in the last few years, Forbes.com has thrived. […] But a closer look at the numbers raises questions about Forbes.com’s industry-leading success. For its claim of a worldwide audience of nearly 15.3 million, it has been citing February data from comScore Media Metrix, one of the two leading providers of third-party Web traffic data. There are several problems with that statistic, though, and comScore has since revised the figure downward to less than 13.2 million as part of a broader revamping of its worldwide data for many sites. Jack Flanagan, executive vice president at comScore Media Metrix, said the new figures were released “a couple of months ago” after it changed its methods for estimating global audiences.

Notice that there is no mention of what happened to statistics for other business news sites. Were they all revised downward after comScore’s “broader revamping”? The article singles out Forbes.com, and leaves out that important context.

What else does the article offer by way of evidence to back up its headline? Interviews with Forbes.com chief rivals:

The Forbes site’s assertions that it is top dog irk its competitors. “Forbes.com is not the biggest,” Vivek Shah, president of digital publishing for Time Inc.’s business and finance network, said in an e-mail message on Friday.
His comment was seconded by L. Gordon Crovitz, publisher of The Journal and executive vice president of Dow Jones, who is responsible for Dow Jones’s consumer brands, including The Wall Street Journal, Barron’s and MarketWatch. Both Mr. Shah and Mr. Crovitz pointed to figures from Nielsen/NetRatings, which they say undercut those from Forbes.com.

The Nielson/NetRatings show Dow Jones and CNNMoney ahead of Forbes.com, according to the article. But finally, we come to this admission:

The debate is more than just a numbers game. According to Nielsen/NetRatings, the Forbes site attracted almost $55 million in revenue in 2005, the most among business publications, including The Wall Street Journal, BusinessWeek and the business pages of The New York Times.

An article exploring the world of web stats, advertising and the difficulties of getting accurate numbers would have been interesting and helpful. This article — a thinly disguised shot at the competition — was neither.