We Have a Winner in Our ?Predict Our iPad Coverage? Contest

Who could have guessed, in January 2011, that we would publish 453 stories on Apple’s yet-to-be-announced iPad?

And yet that’s the number we did publish, and four people guessed exactly that number.

A little over a year ago, we challenged you to guess how many stories we’d publish in 2010 on the topic of Apple’s forthcoming tablet.

We knew it was a hot topic: Every story we’d written to that date on an “Apple tablet” got tons of attention, and lots of comments (both pro and con). We’d seen tantalizing rumors, and figured it would either be a hot product or a spectacular flop. We knew we’d be writing a lot of stories on the topic to meet the demand for information on it.

Little did we know that we’d average about 2 stories for every workday.

We received over 10,000 entries for the contest. Guesses ranged from 0 to 99999999999999999999 (followed by a lot more nines). There were some nerdy guesses too, like 3.14159 and 6.0221415 � 10²³.�There were some snarky answers, like “365*x where x=# tablets sold” and “0 (i hope).” Someone even tried to inject a function in order to capitalize on the wisdom of the crowd, with an entry that read: =AVERAGE(A2:A1000)+1. Sorry, that formula did not compute.

Eliminating the truly absurd guesses (anything over 10,000), the average of all remaining guesses was 309. Not too far from the actual number, but not nearly close enough for the averaging function to have worked in any case.

To count the number of iPad stories, I used a Google search to find all stories published on Wired.com from January 1, 2010 to December 31, 2010 that included “iPad” in the title. I turned off any content filtering and told Google to show me all the duplicates.

Searching on the titles was the easiest objective way to determine if the iPad was a major focus for the story, and not just something mentioned in passing.

In addition, because the name “iPad” was only used after Apple’s iPad unveiling on Jan. 27, 2010, I also did a search for stories with “Apple tablet” in the name published from January 1 to January 30, 2010.

I put both search results into a spreadsheet, sorted by name, and eliminated duplicates as well as any automatically-generated category and tag pages.

The resulting total was 453. I found four entrants who had guessed that number, so used a random-number generator to pick between them. I did so blind: The columns showing any personally-identifying information were hidden from the moment the contest started. It was only after picking the winner that I revealed the columns containing his name.

And so our winner is Mike Gorman.

Mike, you’ll be getting an iPad from Wired. Congratulations.

Photo credit: Robert Occhialini/Flickr