As a teaser, Arab Advisors Group mentioned in the press release about the survey that, “65.3 percent of Internet users in Saudi Arabia play games online.” Two months after that statement was made public, thousands of websites are already touting that figure. The question is, “What does that statistic really mean?”

Not much, especially if you don’t purchase the complete report. Samer Abbas, senior research analyst, Arab Advisors Group remarked that the idea behind releasing the statistic about online gaming in Saudi Arabia was merely to strike interest in the survey. The goal was to encourage companies to pay for the complete survey information rather than to give information away free.  

“This survey was basically about Internet use and e-commerce. A lot of companies are investing in games (development) now and they really get delighted when they know we have some data,” said Abbas. “What we’re trying to do is to increase our knowledge base about gaming and one way to do that is to incorporate questions about gaming into our regular surveys.”

The Saudi Internet use survey asked a few general questions about online gaming. If respondents had played any type of game online — even once — they would answer, “Yes” to the question about using the Internet to play games online. There was enormous variation across age groups concerning online gaming and the survey queried users of the Internet in Saudi Arabia, not only those users of the Kingdom’s Internet who were Saudi.

According to Abbas, respondents to the survey were randomly targeted by receiving an e-mail shot in their e-mail inbox utilizing multiple reputable mailing-list operators. The survey results encompassed answers from over 1,150 respondents that passed quality control checks conducted by the Arab Advisors Group. Abbas clarified that around 70 percent of the respondents in the survey were Saudis and the remainder were other nationalities. He remarked that more males completed the survey than females — a trend in all online surveys.

It should also be realized that the survey focused only on people who both accessed the Saudi Internet and who used e-mail, not younger individuals who might play games online but who would communicate through social networking sites or perhaps not use online channels to communicate at all.

“We do inform everyone about the exact nature of the sample group,” Abbas said. “There are really very few companies doing research into gaming in this part of the world so our survey serves an essential purpose. We’re hoping to be helping people know more about the market and get insights.”

What’s the lesson here? Before copying and pasting the latest statistic into a presentation or article, it’s essential to make sense of what that number actually means, or in truth, it means nothing at all.