Hi Reader -

The booster rockets on the entire United States Space Shuttle fleet, were designed based on the dimensions of the rear ends of two Roman horses.

I’m not joking. Stay with me.

The boosters had to ship by rail to the launch site.

The rail route went through tunnels.

The tunnels were sized for the trains.

The trains were the gauge of the railway, which is 4 feet 8.5 inches.

That weird number didn’t come from anywhere obvious.

The British set it because the people who built the first railways had previously built trams.

The trams used the same jigs as horse-drawn wagons.

The wagons were that exact width because that’s how wide the deep ruts in old Roman roads were.

The Roman ruts were that width because Roman roads were sized for two horses pulling a chariot side by side.

Two horses, give or take a tail, are roughly 4 feet 8.5 inches across.

So when we spent $209 billion building five spacecraft that flew 135 missions, built the International Space Station, and deployed the Hubble Space Telescope, we accidentally sized their booster rockets against the dimensions of a horse.

(Bits of this chain might be apocryphal. The thrust is real. The horses are real. The puns are DEFINITELY real ;))

Anywayyyy, here’s the thing about old standards.

Nobody at NASA sat down and asked whether the railway gauge made sense.

Why would they? It was already there.

The trains existed. The tunnels were already dug. Everything just got built around what was already built around what was already built.

Until the chain ran two thousand years deep and ended at a horse nobody had ever seen.

That’s how you end up with rockets sized by Roman horses.

It’s also how you end up with whatever you’ve inherited in your ad account.

What does that have to do with you and I?

Mobile UA and web measurement happened to grow up separately.

Mobile coalesced around its own pile of things. MMPs. Postbacks. SKAdNetwork. AEM. The device graph. A bunch of standards everyone argues about but mostly uses anyway.

Web coalesced around a different pile. Platform pixels. Conversion APIs. The various server-side things each network rolled out on its own timeline.

Neither pile is the right way to do it. They’re just the piles that calcified, in two different decades, with nobody in charge of making them line up.

And nobody asks anymore whether the gap between the two piles is actually a real thing about the world, or whether it’s just the seam where two arbitrary histories happened to meet.

Your dashboard disagrees with your bank account because of that seam.

You’ve been planning your business around it as if it were physics.

But it’s really just the place where mobile’s mess and web’s mess happened to bump into each other.

It’s a horse.

Two things to take away.

One. The piles aren’t going to reconcile, and most teams waste years trying to make them.

Two. The teams that get past the seam figure out how to measure performance in a way that doesn’t depend on either pile being honest.

That’s the whole move. Extremely boring. But available to anyone who stops waiting for the platforms to agree.

P.S. Our friends at AppsFlyer just shipped something on the web side of this specifically. Measurement infrastructure that finally treats web like its own thing rather than a calcified accident. Worth a look if any of the above sounded uncomfortably familiar.

PPS: The above is a sponsored link w/ Appsflyer.