Statistics and how they really all just suck…
Now here is something that I have been preaching. Preaching to the choir I see by Scoble’s take on it. Yes, statistic services are all over the place. I’ve probably talked about statistics at least once a week. Why? Because all the services really, honestly, just suck.
Why? Because none of them are accurate. You get some degree of figuring out who is viewing your material. Yes, I’ll give it that much. As I said a little while ago, you either “get a hit, page view, unique” or you don’t. Period. End of story.
It’s really quite simple. The only way to figure it out is to be “standing over your server” and watch each hit, view, unique come in. Stand there with a hand held counter. That is about the only way any of these services can be truly accurate.
I personally watch like 3 of the services. I have scripts installed in the same spot on my pages. It still doesn’t matter. None of them count 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, etc… It’s really simple. It’s not rocket science. Why do these stat counters act like it’s a big technical deal? Money.
Bottom line, it’s the money they receive, the money they work with. The more money, the more inaccurate the counting mechanism becomes. How so? Well whoever funds these simple counting services can easily skew the numbers simply by asking. Simply by making a phone call.
Now I’m not saying that it all works like that, but it can. The point is again back to how simple this really is. In technical terms, when there is a view, hit, unique created – one IP address called a web formatted page from another IP address. Unless you are huge like Google and have many IP addresses, that IP address just called your IP address (or your servers where you site is hosted). That’s it. That is counted as ONE.
Technically Speaking, I can’t believe that in 2007 someone hasn’t figured out yet that these statistic people are all full of it. Should I just append the “sh” with that last two letter word? Yeah, I really wanted to do that, but I try to keep this blog as clean as possible. Why? For more hits, uniques, and page views baby! 
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