PHILELEFTHEROS newspaper is in a bitter legal battle with the Dias Media Group, which it said fiddled its Google Analytics codes to show double its actual online visits.
Phileleftheros said it was suing Dias and its portal Sigmalive for deliberately installing a double registration software code.
Furthermore, Phileleftheros claims Sigmalive projects misleading and false information on the amount of visits the newspaper’s website philenews.com receives, “which try to show and/or show that the users of www.sigmalive.com are many more that the users of the website www.philenews.com”.
But in a counterattack yesterday, Sigmalive announced that it would be suing Phileleftheros “for defamation and damaging falsehoods”.
Phileleftheros said it would present reports by independent experts, which prove its case. The newspaper, which made its lawsuit public on Wednesday, said it was seeking compensation for “defamation and malicious lies”, as well as an order banning Sigmalive and Dias Media Group from comparing its own data with philenews.com.
“To attempt through mudslinging to justify the vast difference that separates you from the competition is the easy solution,” Sigmalive replied in an announcement yesterday. “But at the same time it shows that you have no sense of the market, or of the product itself.”
The website, backed by Dias, felt there was some maliciousness behind Phileleftheros’ actions.
“The specific publication is a lie, and defamatory. No one involved with Sigmalive has intervened in the website’s code in a way that would affect the results of Google Analytics or any other service that counts visits,” Dias said.
Sigmalive went on to accuse Phileleftheros of lacking “any trace of journalistic ethics and solidarity” and of using unfounded claims to create doubts over fellow media colleagues.
“How is it possible for other independent media research agencies, such as AGB Nielsen, to present the same visitor figures as those of Google Analytics? Did someone alter those figures too?” Sigmalive asked.
To prove its point, it compared the figures of Nielsen Online Measurements with those of Google Analytics for the period December 1-21.
Nielsen showed that sigmalive.com had 3,973,928 hits from 475,635 unique visitors, while Google Analytics said there were 3,561,544 hits by 325,903 unique visitors.
“The progress of Sigmalive.com in all the three years of its presence has proved to be steadily on the rise, without presenting any suspicious fluctuations, which could be caused by the sudden alteration of data,” the website pointed out.
“The legal advisors of Dias Media Group and the company Sigmalive Ltd have already been instructed to file a lawsuit for defamation and damaging falsehoods. For all the aforementioned reasons, the company Sigmalive Ltd and Dias Media Group expect a restoration of the truth and the real picture by Phileleftheros, and they reserve their rights for compensation for defamation and malicious lies.”
