DIAG-7 · Diagnosis · Invariant: holds by construction, no expiry
A zero identifies nothing
The law
A zero reading assigns near-equal likelihood to no-demand, no-exposure, and event-dropping measurement failure; alone it identifies no cause. Silence becomes evidence of absence only after exposure and instrument health are independently verified, with strength scaling with expected volume.
Scope
Count/event metrics whose failure modes suppress rather than inflate.
What this licenses you to do
Before any verdict on a zero metric, confirm spend/impressions in the same window and a prior non-zero baseline from the same source; alert on worked-then-stopped, never on absolute zeros.
Evidence
Observed at scale in production health-monitoring systems: a detector tuned for sensitivity over precision can raise the overwhelming majority of its incidents as false positives, teaching operators to distrust and eventually ignore the entire alert class, the exact failure this law predicts.
Riibon's own analysis is held to these laws
The laws on this site are a public subset of the rulebook Riibon's analysis works to. Before a metric movement is called a market event, the order of checks they set has to rule out the measurement first.
Ask the Riibon app why a number in your account moved, and see which checks it ran first. Access starts with a short call: we look at your ads together, then run them for you or set the app up with you.