I'm sorry, I simply don't believe the traffic stats for today. Sitemeter tells me that I had 2 visitors between 1600 and 1700; Blogger Stats tells me that I had something like 100 page views in that same time period. Normal traffic looks like a ratio of hits:page views like 1:1.4.
Peter wrote about this a while back. It's likely that Sitemeter doesn't pick up on RSS feeds, and so their service sadly is less and less valuable, at least to me. As someone who's getting within striking distance of a million hits, it makes me wonder whether I've already reached it. Probably not, but as with the climate science temperature databases, once you start questioning the soundness of the data there's not much left.
14 comments:
I'm seeing the same thing...and Sitemeter has been down for me most of the week-end. About ready to pull it off my blog.
I dropped Sitemeter a month or so ago, when they had a virus issue. Never bothered putting them back. Not worth the trouble,
I also stopped looking at my visit totals. I doubt I'm anywhere near a million, but I just stopped worrying about it.
Someone once said to me "I thought you said you blogged for yourself, and didn't care how many people read it?" It took me a while to grow into that claim.
Sitemeter is definitely having problems today.
For some reason it is displaying two counters on my main page, each with a different number. A click on either of them leads to a message "The report is currently unavailable" and no data as usual.
I'll admit, I nearly always read in google reader, increasingly on my Android. I only count on those when I follow through for commenting or reading same. I suppise if I wrote more (most recent post is at least 2 mo back) I would worry abt it, but I dont. Id say go ahead and celebrate a million hits. Heck, if you want, I'll even peer review it for you.
Wolfman, I'll bet that you're one of those Deniers ...
;-)
The only reliable way to measure traffic is to run your own server and look at the logs yourself with awstats or webalizer.
Unless you're looking at the httpd logs you're not seeing reality.
They lost my account a few weeks ago. Then I got the double meter/different count thing. Only reason I use it was the internal google counters suck, too. Or 100 Russian/Chinese people per day are reading my crappy blog....yeah, I didn't think so, either.
I've been suspicious about it for some time - I really should pull it off since I don't look at it anymore.
The site seems to be working again.
I have used it for 2yrs or so and it seem pretty reliable to me.
Some of the hits u get are random google people who link in thru pictures you have in a post.
Sitemeter hasn't been anywhere close to reality for years.
They don't get any feed readers (and that's something like 75% of my readership) or subscribers through the google/blogger subscription services; they don't get people who read the blog through facebook, they don't get... anything really.
The only reason I keep sitemeter up is because I like their referrer log format; but even then google analytics does a much better job of getting referrer data.
LIke the others said, Sitemeter's been screwy all weekend. Something about switching servers but geez they sure had trouble making that switch....
Oh, and I actually find Sitemeter to be compareable to my server's numbers, with the exception that Sitemeter lets me ignore my own visits, which is handy.
My account won't let me access individual visitors and all my IP addresses have the same first eight numbers. I"m dropping it.
My account won't let me access individual visitors and all my IP addresses have the same first eight numbers. I"m dropping it.
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