Dave Friend’s website says the following…
We are also making very effective use of the Internet via opt-in email, electronic publications, and this website. As of 04/30/05 this website has received over 198,000 hits and we average well over 2,200 hits each and every day.
What comes to mind when you read that last line? For most people, they would think 2200 people come to his website on a daily basis. For other people (like me) I see through this deception. Dave Friend is deceiving visitors to his website that aren’t familiar with internet stats. The real question for the Dave Friend campaign is how many “unique visitors” does your website get per day.
If you bear with me for a few seconds, I will explain the difference between a “unique visitor” and a “hit.” Let’s say Dave Friend’s hompage has nine graphics on it. Each time a person goes to that page, it is counted as 10 “hits” (one file and nine graphics). So Dave Friend could have 100 “visitors” to his website but claim he had 1000 “hits.” Do you see how this works and how misleading it is? I call on Dave Friend to quit misleading the internet community and take that number off your site (or at the very least explain what it means).
If in fact Dave Friend’s website does get 2200 “unique visitors” per day, then I apologize. But I’m so confident that his website doesn’t get that much traffic that I’m willing to put my money where my mouth is. If Dave Friend’s campaign can prove to me that it gets 2200 “unique visitors” per day then I will donate $250 to his campaign. There is the challenge Mr. Friend. The ball is in your court.
Update: The “hits” are no longer listed on the homepage of the Friend website, but the challenge still stands.
What a challenge chief! You must be pretty sure to bet $250 on it.
Actually, your account of a “hit’ is a little deceptive these days too, with the common use of the HTTP/1.1 protocol versus HTTP/1.0. In 1.0 you would be right, for each item (e.g. image) on a webpage, a separate request or ‘hit’ would be made by the client browser (e.g. Firefox) and then be logged by the webserver. With 1.1 however, a single TCP connection is made and all items on the website are downloaded in 1 request or ‘hit’. This makes pages load faster too, since the time delay in setting up another connection for each new request is not wasted.
Still, a physical person will likely make more than visit to just the main page of the website, they will likely click on other links, read the blog, post a comment, etc… and all of these each add up to another hit to the website. So again, it’s not representative of the “number of users” (which Friend never said it was, but rather ‘hits’) - but really, there is no good measure for that…
Webservers can also count the different IP addresses that visit the website, but many ISPs give out ‘fake’ IP addresses to many dialup users which are simply hidden behind 1 real IP. So, if every user in this scenario visited the website, the server would only record 1 unique IP address - which is also not accurate of the number of unique “visitors” to visit the site either.
So- while you consider Friend’s statement about “hits” deceptive (i.e. “fudging the numbers”), I consider your response to be slightly as well. He used the proper termonology, referring to the numbers only as “hits”. It is very good of you though to explain what a “hit”, as most people are not computer geeks like us who understand the intricacies of the Internet. =)
When given a statistic or number, always question what it REALLY means.
[1] http://getfirefox.com IE Sucks