An item by James Murray about the role we're playing in the election is highly flattering to bloggers. It's also more than a little misleading and misinformed;
Canada's Pierre Bourque, Bourque Newswatch is Canada's top blogger. His site reports five million readers a month.
Bourque leads a revolution in Canada. Pierre Bourque has started linking headlines on his popular site to some of Canada's bloggers.
It will be interesting to see how long before Matt Drudge's American Drudge Report waits before he will follow Bourque's lead.
Angry in the Great White North has had half a million visits in the past thirty days. A huge number of visits.
Last night, he linked to a post on Strongworld, in a bold headline. This morning, it's dropped to about third, but still prominently displayed. Bill's sitemeter shows a strong surge in traffic - 1,725 visits since midnight.
However, Bourque.org indicate 5 million visits in the past month - or 7,000 an hour. If that's true, he's pushing more traffic than Instapundit.
Thus, it's hard to explain why Strongworld sitemeter registered only 280 visits when I last checked. It was early morning, but with no incoming links from either Neale or Bourque, the sitemeter here showed 214 in the same time period.
And that's about what I'd expect. SDA traffic averages around 1,000 an hour at peak hours - and links from Bourque or Nealenews (or any Canadian site, mainstream included) produce only a modest surge. This is in contrast to a Malkin or Instalanche, in which the meter can move to triple that or more, depending on whether it's a primary or secondary reference.
Kinsella reports on January 11th, his site received 200,000 hits.
A "hit" and a "visit" are not the same thing.
A hit is one file being downloaded. Let's suppose you visit a page with 100 thumbnails on it. Each one of those thumbnails is a file in addition to the web page itself. So, by coming to that one page with the 100 images, you have just generated 101 hits. But only one person visited. So a site that gets 87,000 hits may have only 3,000 visitors, depending on how the site is designed.
It doesn't, however, explain why he didn't fact check.
Well Kate I'll sum it up for you as best as I can, Pierre who?
Posted by: the bear at January 13, 2006 8:57 AMAs a person who has studied webmastering at a college level I completely agree with what Kate is saying. The hits they just keep on coming. Even when I was working on my sites the hit counter would count every upload I did, as many as 300 hits during 1 editing session.
The bottom line is that the internet is a spawning ground for exageration, untruth and personal ego stroking.
This is why I have a healthy amount of skepticism for all things internet and that includes blogs.
Posted by: Ron at January 13, 2006 9:18 AMI should also include that the internet is a great method for information exchange and can be a very powerful tool when used by the correct people for the correct reasons.
Posted by: Ron at January 13, 2006 9:26 AMi wanted to say something about mr bourque's link to infozone's laudatory (for him primarily, and for bloggers in general) article but i thought it was something written for the newbies. coming over to your site (a real blog!) it was nice to see you uphold the trade's integrity so well (as with everything you do...where do i put my ad).
Posted by: Ottawa Core at January 13, 2006 9:38 AMKate's right about site meter shorting the count. I added a bravenet counter about a month ago and sync'd it up with the sitemeter at that time. Now, there's a difference betwen them of about 2100 visits...
...and I'm still stuck at only 250 visits/day
:(
Borque has embraced the blogoshere and frankly, I think his site has improved vastly for it...I read it again because it isn't completely flooded with the same old corporate MSM axe grinding gruel.
Borque has also profitied from the extra traffic the blog links bring him...the alternate media has arrived in the froze white barrens.
The "pajama people" have slipped into their more formal jeans and sneekers for their MSM debute ;-)
Playing games with site hit numbers is just a reflection of where the money is, hit counts are about the only thing on which a site owner will be able to base charges for advertising. I'm no expert or techie whiz, but I think the staggeringly high Google stock valuation is based primarily on internet advertising revenue. I also think (but I may be wrong, someone more techie can maybe comment on this) sites like Bourque's and Norm Spector's constantly refresh while you are reading them, and this runs up the hit counters.
Posted by: calgarian at January 13, 2006 10:02 AMI have a suspicion that even if James Murray understood the difference between "hits" and "visits", he'd use the former before the latter.
"Hits" is so much hipper than "visits".
Posted by: Huck at January 13, 2006 10:02 AMKate--just announced by Valeri on Roy Greens show(900 CHML) that he is going to sue the Bourque blog for the article on Valeri's house sale. Surely everyone knows that Bourque is a news site, not a blog. But just like Layton and the Shouldice Clinic that he didn't know it was private--is this a way for the Liberals to get a wedge issue started to shut down blogs--planting in peoples minds that blogs are bad? Surely anyone knows the difference between blogs and nes sites--Bourque printed an article from the MSM--this is the Liberals first move against bloggers--I have no doubt about that.
Posted by: George at January 13, 2006 10:27 AMYour Site Meter account is probably tracking slightly different things from your server stats and that is why you are seeing a difference. I run several tracking systems from other companies to verify Site Meter's totals and they are usually within 1-2% of each other after you account for the differences. Here is a page that may help in your comparisons.
http://www.sitemeter.com/?action=help&area=compare
Thanks for the post, Kate. Very informative: not just about the difference between hits and visits but about the influence of a link from Bourque vs. a Malkin, and clarification on why Drudge doesn't link to blogs. We are still so small here compared to the US which is a reflection of the population of course, but also the breadth of interest in blogs for information. That will change after this election for sure.
Also, I have to disagree with you on Bourque as a news aggregator/blog. This election he has turned himself into a blog or the equivalent of one. Clearly he links only to negative news of the Liberals - and that, just to be clear of my view on this, is entirely his perogative, we all have our biases and, given the state of Martin and his campaign, maybe not even unjustified. But he is reposting and linking to everything that gets leaked to him, including emails, private documents that are not covered in any blog or MSM, rumours in his notes, etc. etc. In other words, he's trying to create news and spread opinion just like any blogger or MSM columnist. I think Nealenews preserves the concept of an online news aggregator, i.e. current news that comes from all and various sources, with a particular acumen for relevant news not being picked up by the traditional media.
TB
Cerberus
Well said. That's why I prefer to rely upon the OS-based volume monitoring package Webaliser rather than 3rd party counters. The former can be audited, the latter can't.
Hit are a completely useless stat unless you want to take a look at IO ratios. So what I do is show the number of visitors, unique visitors, pageviews, hits and data transferred, and publish all of that ... for readers to decide themselves what data they are interested in. See here:
http://www.thiscanada.com/category/site-statistics/
Much, much better than using the phony stat of "hits" as an indication of traffic.
Personally, I think PageViews, followed by visitors and unique visitors, are the only usual indicators of traffic.
Posted by: Erik Sorenson at January 13, 2006 11:16 AMWell I just took the time to visit the Bourque site - lots of good links there BUT the web dude needs to learn how to code. As far as the hits vs. visits debate - maybe it's just an issue of him not knowing the difference. At least that what the presentation & design is kind of telling me.
Posted by: the bear at January 13, 2006 12:07 PMI have to somewhat disagree with Erik's post above. Hits are the only 'true' and accurate form of web reporting. Useless for comparison yes, but they are an accurate one-to-one count for what happened on the web server.
Visits, page views and any other type of attempt to summarize the actual hits (which is the ONLY real stat reported by the web server) lead to confusion and inaccuracies. Vists for example are NOT reported by a web server, but are computed by the stats program in a (usually) proprietary algorithm. You can always examine open source web stats programs to see differences in these algorithms.
The point being, it is likely that no two stats programs report visits the same. Because a visit is calculated it is open to interpretation. I have written a stats program for a small company to zero in on specific areas of interest that a packaged stats program couldn't evaluate. The program lies in interpreting "what is a visit?" Is it one IP address visiting the site within a given period? What period is that exactly? When do we count a record from that same site as a second 'visit'? How do we handle people visiting from an AOL proxy where several thousand people may be behind the same IP? How about visits from the Google cache or IA Archiver? You can see why you'll get different interpretations of visits.
As far as Bourque, hits is best in his case so he can sell advertising. I have to admit though, that because he links to external images, he has a pretty fair representation.
Think of it this way, you have a page with 10 graphics on it. Someone requests the page. This shows up in your log as 11 hits. 1 for the page, 10 for the graphics.
Now, consider you have one page with 10 graphics on it BUT the links are offsite, and the graphics come from other sites - otherwise known as content or bandwidth stealing! This is in Bourque's ballpark. He recently had a scandal about some pron appearing on his page that I was asked to check out. When I got there the porn was gone but I found that the pics I examined came from other sites, indicating someone got made at serving those 7,000 requests an hour from Bourque so they replaces the image with a porn image. That's my guess anyway.
But the bottom line is this - if Bourque is linking to external images exclusively, then 1 hit = 1 page view (not 1 visit).
Things in the world of Internet statistic evaluation are not so plain, and numbers serve to impress, but finding a real number is hard to do.
Sitemeter is probably right if they under-guesstimate because it is important to take into account things like unregistered robots and crawlers that come from IP addresses impersonating a browser, email harvesters, content examination bots, BETA bots, other aggregators, bots from web hosting companies that examine various aspects of a site to stay within their ToS, viruses and worms, and just about every other non-human and non-legitimate form of traffic that every site gets everyday.
The problem with the "hit" method of measuring traffic is that any webmaster can add 500 transparent two pixel wide gifs to a site and run the meter up - it's as dishonest as the print newspapers that inflate their circulation rates, when the site is selling advertising.
Also - remember that Bourque runs a forum. One of the users on our private server owns one of these, and it's a constant drain on resources. Everytime a reader refreshes that forum page, all the small image files are reloaded - hence additional hits.
Posted by: Kate at January 13, 2006 12:44 PMHITS = How Idiots Track Stats
That said, 200,000 hits on Warrens site is still impressive. Safari reports 13 deliveries from . Assuming that's what he meant by "site" (and that's probably a very bad assumption) 200,000 hits would mean just under 15,400 visits. That's not an unreasonable number.
As Erik says, there are a number of measurements that need to be taken into account to get any meaningful understanding of tru traffic on any web site. In my day job, I report visits (with a 15 minute cutoff), unique addresses, registered users, subscribers, megs of data delivered, banner ad views, click-throughs... and we're looking at which of those have any real meaning these days. F'rinstance, clicks are currently experiencing a huge wave of fraud.
Posted by: djb at January 13, 2006 1:17 PMApparently URLS don't get posted the way I type. That second sentence can be read as "That said, 200,000 hits on Warrens site is still impressive. Safari reports 13 deliveries from hit blog page." by way of translation.
Posted by: djb at January 13, 2006 1:19 PMJust re-reading this article - because this computer stuff is my passion.
First, Kate, site traffic may not be easily verified. I haven't worked on one site yet where we leave a cookie crumb of our traffic. It is locked up for only the admin and marketing people to view. No page counters or anything of the like. So I assume some other sites take that position as well. But your point is taken about the reporter not doing their job....a seemingly popular trend in their field.
"Kinsella reports on January 11th, his site received 200,000 hits."
Why Kinsella leaves his Webalizer stats online I don't know.
On Dec. 30, 2005 he had
Hits: 140692 Files: 88896 Pages: 71066 Visits: 7187 Sites: 4089
On his 'big' day of Jan 11, 2006 he had:
Hits: 201270 Files: 92105 Pages: 32946 Visits: 17041 Sites: 8612
You can see some problems with quoting stats here. He had approx. 50% more hits on the 11th of Jan, almost exactly the same number of files served, LESS THAN HALF of the pages served on Dec 30th, nearly 70% more visits from 2 times as many sites.
I could easily go into a detailed analysis but it's not needed here other than to say that the article quoting Kinsella's 200,000 hits is misleading. Did he have 200,000 hits on Jan 11th, yes. Does that relate to how popular he is? No. Does that mean Canada is swayed by the political leanings of Kinsella? Nope. Should I change my vote because everyone is falling all over Kinsella's site? Ya right. I think the blogosphere has a bit too much discernment to be swayed by an MSM article.
At the end of January, when the totals for Kinsellas site are in for the month we can make some absolute points. For now, we can make some generalizations regarding his traffic.
First, he has a total number of hits reported by his stats program of 1514000 up to this point in January.
By examining other aspects of his stats we can probably discredit the hype.
Examining his top 30 URLs we find that a file called site.css, which provides the visual display information for his site, is the 2nd most popular page on his site after his blog homepage. That garners an extra hit per page already inflating his hits by double what is practical. Subtract those 127,017 hits from the total.
The 3rd, 6th, 7th, 8th....and so on, positions are held by his stats. That's either me looking at his stats, or Kinsella looking at his stats. Not genuine content created by Kinsella, not valid for stats purposes. Shouldn't be included in stats. They make up a total of 111426 hits to be subtracted from total.
Scripts, particularly javascript stored in external files, that control unknown aspects and don't make up readable content count for at least 20006 hits.
He has a couple of video files on his site which don't contribute to content created by Kinsella. They may also be linked from other sites meaning they shouldn't count for visits to his site either. You don't have to visit someones homepage to see a video....the link may have been in your email, or better yet, from bandwidth theives like Bourque. These videos total at least 2184 hits. Big files. These hits do count as 1 hit = 1 visit or 1 page.
So far that means we have
1514000 hits
-260633
------------
1253367 hits for probably legitimate content.
Now that number still seems high right?
Let's look at his visitors for a minute or two.
His biggest visitor was from ip177-131.netcathost.com and took 24461 hits from 24461 files using 0 kbytes in only 2 visits. How is that possible? Probably a bot that made an HTTP head request which leaves a mark in the server log but takes no real page. Most bots are more respectful than to take that many hits in only 2 visits. But they didn't use any bandwidth, indicating they didn't grab, read, process, index or otherwise use his pages. Bottom line, there is another 23361 illegitimate hits we can take off the record.
Another 14172 hits come from localhost (in 4 visits) - the #2 visitor. Those can go too.....
What about visits from Kinsella himself? They probably make up the #3 spot at 10,103 hits.
In his referrers section the majority of the entries are phoney, generated by crawlers that seek to only leave entries in the log files so they will show up in the stats file and hoping that a webmaster will click them to find out what the are. Most are for pharmacy scams. All referrers are not listed but those that are count for more than 30,000 hits.
Also noted are the 14155 hits that came from an online pharmacy. Same deal, fake entries.
We could go on counting this stuff as long as it keeps coming in.
And this is only the beginning of the list. This kind of garbage happens all day long on the Internet. How many of these fake visitors requested phoney files of non-content and were counted in Kinsellas 200,000 hits on January 11th? We don't know without examining JUST that log file for that day, but it is safe to say that ANY stats coming from Kinsella's "open-to-all" statistics page or some un-seasoned self-promoting self-proclaimed 'web master' and reported in the MSM by a 'thorough' and well-trained liberal arts college journalist would be about as valid as what we've seen here today.
Kate,
I understand your point about hits. I was just saying the hits are an exact representation of what happens on the web server, while all other forms of statistics are derivative calulations of hits. As I demonstrated above, hits are falsified by phoney entries, bots and non content BUT, visits and page views are influenced by hits and, in most cases, those same phoney entries.
A better indication of real viewers is the page view. Page view indicates that a page of content, and not a hit or image or css file or HEAD request, was served to someone other than a registered crawler. That can still be erroneous because of those pharmacy crawlers and the like. My last yard stick would be 'Visits', because it is calculated from the above and tries to make a guess about who is coming back. It is more reliable if it comes from someone like sitemeter using cookies then it is from a website without cookies like Kinsella's webalizer stats.
Proprietary algorithms calulating numbers from falsified web server log file entries. Doesn't make for good indications of traffic. But then again, it sounds like a summary for Statistics Canada.
How many computing machine thingies are in Canada?
Posted by: alsocanadian at January 13, 2006 2:23 PMKate, considering the number of visits you receive on your blog, I am very surprised that you only have a single ad, from Mattress Mattress. You are missing out on some serious cash - on the order of five to ten grand a month. Check out Chitika minimalls, and I'm sure you could get another big blogger to invite you into BlogAds.
Posted by: Ed Minchau at January 13, 2006 4:31 PMIt's true Kate, you could be getter some ad cash. Just don't put your foot out the car window like Bourque has "What would you do if there was no Bourque....donate now!" Please Pierre....
Regarding what we were discussing earlier. If you have Firefox installed, visit bourque, visit Tools -> Page Info -> Media and you will get a list of all image links on the page. Bourque only has 4 that point to bourque.org, he 'borrows' the rest.
I wanted to examine the source to look for a stylesheet or external JS file, but I couldn't read his source! Typically that stuff is located in the head tags, but this guy has head tags overlapping body tags....it was a real mess.
What would I do if there were no Bourque? The same thing I do now. Visit a REAL site....
I forgot Kate.....I couldn't find the forum on his site, but the link on his menu that says 'Discuss' points to an external domain called 'voy.com' which wouldn't be tabulated in his web stats....
Posted by: Altruistic at January 13, 2006 5:24 PMIt is simple, Kate. Bourque misrepresents his stats. He has been doing it for years. So has Kinsella for that matter. I guess this is what some men do when the blog is not as big as they want it to be.
Posted by: the way it is at January 13, 2006 5:25 PMI don't know much about hits, visits etc but what I do know is this;
When I go to Kinsella's site and read his latest post, then look at the comments and I see 50-100-200-250 I compare that to the number of comments on other GOOD sites like SDA and Angry and notice he has a LOT more. And I can verify that by reading the comments.
Horny Toad
Posted by: Horny Toad at January 13, 2006 10:28 PMHey Horny,
Comments _are not_ a reliable stat. Especially on Comment Please. It's a separate site and lots of people just surf there rather then the originating site.
It's (subjectively) easy to verify that by looking at the noise to signal ratio on that site.
Cheers,
lance
Another good public indicator that Bourque.com misrepresents his traffic is available on google ads. Google ads reports the following:
"Welcome to AdWords
Thank you for trying the 'Advertise on this site' link. ...
Where your ad will appear
bourque.org
Maximum Impressions/Day: 0-10,000
This is the number of impressions this site delivers to all its users each day. It is NOT the total your own ad will receive.
..."
Google knows internet traffic. bourque.com has an adsense account. Google tracks. It is that simple.
TWII,
'fraid it isn't as simple as that. Far from it. We certainly cannot make the claim that Bourque misrepresents his traffic from this Google statement. In fact, we can't determine that at all from this statement.
Bourque DOES NOT have Google AdWords on his home page. The home page of any site is usually the most requested page, particularly for a news or blog site. It is usually several orders of magnitude more popular than any other page.
If he doesn't have those magic Google ads on his home page then there is no way for Google to track him. Google doesn't know anything about Internet traffic except for what passes through them. Just like, you don't know when your neighbor has an incoming phone call.
When you put a Google Ad on your page, it loads directly from Google on every page request. Those ads come right from Google and when they are requested you attach an ID that Google knows belongs to your site. That's how they know you. They know nothing about traffic apart from that.
Looking further on Bourque's site you'll find he only has ads on some secondary pages, not on his home page which no doubt gets the most traffic.
So, using Google's very broad numbers and bourque's lack of insight and inability to read Google's recommendations on where to put adwords, we can make the rather odd but correct assumption that the sum total of Bourque's secondary pages that contain Google AdWords receive from 0 to 10,000 IMPRESSIONS per day. Not very useful.
Keep in mind that impressions and visits are also not the same. One visitor may receive several impressions.
Now, if Bourque rebuilt his site correctly, and utilized Google's own recommendations for where to place adwords (NEVER in a banner), then he may actually make $1 a day and he could quit begging for donations!
Posted by: Altruistic at January 14, 2006 4:00 PMOh No!!!
While writing the above I had Bourque open in the background.
What I discovered is that Pierre has a piece of code that causes the site to reload itself every 4 minutes. Argh! This means that if you look at Bourque and then head off for lunch and leave it open in your browser, when you come back an hour later you will have contributed 15 entries in his web logs.
Now, looking at his homepage lightly (because it is a mess of code), it appears he has about 6 hits for the home page currently. That means, I've contributed to at least 90 hits to his site.
If you are like me and use the fabulous tabbed browsing feature of Firefox then the numbers get even more obscene. I visit a few news sites and blogs and leave them open in tabs all day long. Then I work in another tab frequently switching back and forth as my interest commands. With Bourque's page silently reloading itself every 4 minutes, that means in a 24 hour period I've contributed to 1 page x 6 hits x 15 refreshes/hour x 24 hours = 2160 hits to bourque's totals. if I do this everyday (and I do) that equals 64,800 hits per month to Bourque's stats.
Wow, so if we all did that let's figure out the numbers. Pierre gets 5 million hits per month. 5 million divided by 64,800 = 77. That's right Pierre, a whopping 77 visitors a month. Good for you. Your effort is certainly equal to those numbers.
Of course this is just an example, but it goes to show how numbers can be played with to get the desired result. 77 people visiting Bourque and leaving the site open in their browser with no further action could account for all of his monthly traffic.
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Posted by: i need a personal unsecured loan and am in chapter at January 17, 2006 3:31 AM"And that's why Drudge doesn't link to blogs - with 11 million visits a day, Drudge takes smaller servers down hard."
Actually, Drudge doesn't do blogs because he thinks they are a fad. He doesn't believe in them, really.
http://www.patrickruffini.com/archives/2005/04/drudge_vs_blogs.php
"“I don’t read them. I like to create waves and not surf them. And who are these influential bloggers? You can’t name one because they don’t exist.”"
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