Worldometer, formerly Worldometers, is a reference website that provides counters and real-timestatistics for diverse topics. It is owned and operated by data company Dadax which generates revenue through online advertising. It is part of the Real Time Statistics Project, and is managed by "an international team of developers, researchers, and volunteers". It is available in 34 languages and covers subjects such as world population, government, economics, society, media, environment, food, water, energy, and health. In 2020, the website attained greater popularity due to hosting statistics relating to the COVID-19 pandemic, but its accuracy and methodology were questioned.
History
The website was founded by Andrey Alimetov, a Russian immigrant to the United States, in 2004. It relaunched on January 29, 2008. In 2011, it was voted as one of the best free reference websites by the American Library Association. This site changed its name from "Worldometers" to "Worldometer" in January 2020 and announced that it would migrate to the singular domain name.
In early 2020, the website gained popularity during the COVID-19 pandemic. It came under cyber attack in March 2020. The site was hit with a DDoS attack, and was then hacked a few days later, resulting in incorrect information being shown on its COVID-19 statistics page for approximately 20 minutes. The hacked site showed a dramatic rise in COVID-19 cases in Vatican City, which caused panic among some users of social media. The Spanish government used its figures to claim that it had carried out more tests than all but four other countries. Worldometers' COVID-19 figures have also been cited by Financial Times, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Fox News and CNN. Worldometer has faced criticism over transparency of ownership, lack of citations to data sources, and unreliability of its COVID-19 statistics and rankings. The website reported that 18,000 people recovered from coronavirus in Spain on April 24, compared to the Spanish government figure of 3,105 recoveries for that day.
Reception
Edouard Mathieu, the data manager of Our World in Data, stated that "Their main focus seems to be having the latest number wherever it comes from, whether it’s reliable or not, whether it’s well-sourced or not." Virginia Pitzer, a Yale University epidemiologist, said that the site is "legitimate", but flawed, inconsistent, and containing errors. On the English Wikipedia, editors reached a consensus not to cite Worldometer for coronavirus statistics. According to Axios, the website was the #28 most visited website in the world in April 2020. The plurality of visitors came from the United States, followed by India, the UK, Canada, Germany, Australia, Poland, France, Turkey, and Brazil.
