A hit counter is a rather weak way to measure the popularity or impact of a web page. It includes all sorts of mindless search robot crawls in its tally, and it merrily logs multiple clicks or reloads by the same visitor. On the other hand, a hit counter will underestimate ultimate readership if a page is cached somewhere between the server and the viewer. And no amount of counting will reveal much about the actual importance of a page's contents to its audience.

But then again, a web hit counter is probably better than nothing. Maybe it's similar to another metric which a colleague likes to cite: the number of students whom he has trained in his classes. He multiplies by two and calls it "cheeks in seats" ....

(see also WriteManyReadOnce (25 Nov 1999), WebLogAnalysis (2 Jun 2001), ...)

TopicHumor - TopicScience - 2003-02-09

(correlates: PowerAsPerception, ReadThrough, ThisSide, ...)