Manufacturers are not always the source of lies, often they are the recipients of them.
One trade magazine admitted this, accusing their rivals of 'inflating readership' to charge manufacturers more for advertising. Unfortunately, in the process they exposed their own.
The publication, SecurityNewsDesk, 'showcased' their web server statistics from AWStats, listing ~64,000 visits and ~500,000 page views.
However, AWStats is well known for reporting much much higher numbers than Google Analytics, Quantcast and other more common services that track based on client side javascript.
What SecurityNewsDesk's MD and author of that post either did not know or choose to leave out was that his site is directly measured by Quantcast and their Quantcast numbers are dramatically lower. Quantcast reports just ~13,000 visits and ~20,000 page views for the past month.
SecurityNewsDesk is radically inflating their readership levels relative to commonly accepted metrics.
For a direct comparison, Quantcast also directly reports and measures traffic from SecurityInfoWatch, showing ~123,000 visits and ~200,000 page views for the same time period.
Note: for those interested, IPVM uses Clicky, which has a similar approach to Quantcast (javascript embed, etc.), and reports ~126,000 visits and ~330,000 page views for the same time period.
The bigger problem for all the trade magazines is that they publish very little original content and even less that is insightful, interesting or timely. Without that, it is very hard to get people coming back to one's site regularly and forces a dependence on inflating numbers or maximizing search engine optimization.
As a company who advertises to security professionals, I've come to the conclusion that I can get a far better return on my advertising / marketing dollars on retargeting and social media campaigns.