I am not technologically savvy enough to know or understand what that means.
It means
a) The "contributor" needs to cite the source for the data.
b) Aggregated mobile data basically means they are somehow collecting data about mobile device usage in the are. I'd guess they are measuring cell tower hits, maybe augmenting with GPS data they are getting from some apps.
c) The graphs need to be properly labeled for scale.
Assuming I am correct in b), and that they are basically looking for unique hits on a cell tower (or triangulating distance between multiple), you can see immediately how the data would end up being skewed. Now admittedly the graphic showing an average weekend traffic is presented in 3 dimensions, so the view will be off (kind of like how some maps have Greenland as being HUGE) but I roughly eyeball that as showing that both Epcot and DHS get more "aggregated data" that MK does, with Tyhpoon Lagoon getting more visits than all 3 of them. And this flies completely in the face of most accepted crowd level estimates.
Now without a link back to the original data, we don't know the method being used to determine a visit, but look at what the resort map shows. The two locations (DS and TL) they show as having the most visits are both right next to I4. So if a visit is simply a mobile device pinging a tower, then it would make sense that any device in a car going by on I4 would register as a visit, showing both of those locations to be much heavier trafficked than say MK, which is somewhat isolated with mostly light residential nearby.
Following that train of thought, with Thanksgiving being the biggest travel day of the year (or so all the news reports have been telling me) I'd expect that the towers in the area would potentially see alot more unique hits then, causing the parks to seem busier, than on a day where people aren't travelling.
So if they are say within 10% of each other in actual turnstile clicks, but there is 25% more people on the roads on Thanksgiving than Christmas, that would result in 15% more "guests" being seen on Thanksgiving. Now if someone actually produces the original source data instead of just some unlabeled charts, I may be proven completely wrong. Otherwise it would be like driving by a mall on Black Friday that had people parking in a Circuit City parking lot (a chain that closed years ago) and assuming Circuit City was back in business, without realizing that most people had instead parked there and walked across the street to Best Buy. An interesting way to measure the parks, but one that needs to be taken with a grain of salt, especially when written about by a "Forbes Contributor" which Forbes claims no responsibility for.
