Is worldometer a trustable source?

[tuckerkao]

Originally Posted by Till

I agree with you except worldometer being "some random website". John Hopkins and many more are trusting them -> They are making the corona stats right now that the world looks at!

It does not feel good to me that the operators hide their identity.

I also used the world'o meter data and put them into colored maps. The entire south region is surging up quickly in new cases.

[Uncwilly]

Your colors are deceiving on first view. Red colors should be "hotter", more cases. Blue should be "cooler", fewer cases. Also, leave your base 12 proselytizing in the threads that already exist for it.

[chalsall]

Originally Posted by Till

Dadax - running Worldometer - is a company. I expect that they want to make money. What is their business model?

Charging for access to their data.

Having drilled down on this, it is extremely difficult to get the raw data out of WorldOMeter.

They have gone to great lengths to do everything by way of AJAX. Short of OCR or other tricks, nothing can be "spidered" nor "scraped".

This shouldn't be surprising. The whole point of Capitalism is to reward innovation (well, more precisely, reward shareholders).

But, at the same time, I recently had a client who didn't really understand the problem space and were somewhat disappointed that the WorldOMeter datastream wasn't free (as they thought it was because they could click on it in their browser).

For some reason, an open data source, Our World in Data, was rejected out of hand.

[Till]

Originally Posted by chalsall

Charging for access to their data.

Having drilled down on this, it is extremely difficult to get the raw data out of WorldOMeter.

They have gone to great lengths to do everything by way of AJAX. Short of OCR or other tricks, nothing can be "spidered" nor "scraped".

This shouldn't be surprising. The whole point of Capitalism is to reward innovation (well, more precisely, reward shareholders).

But, at the same time, I recently had a client who didn't really understand the problem space and were somewhat disappointed that the WorldOMeter datastream wasn't free (as they thought it was because they could click on it in their browser).

For some reason, an open data source, Our World in Data, was rejected out of hand.

Yeah, selling their data would be the most logical thing.
I see that now they have a "contact" option: https://www.worldometers.info/contact/
This has not been the case when I created this thread.
Still funny that there is an extra option for "Institutional (if you represent a Government or Institution)"