We've been averaging 1100 "hits" per day here at POVonline. Ergo, we are less than a week from notching 200,000 on the little counter at the bottom of this page.
Web counters are close to meaningless. When you access a site, an "I.P." address is transmitted. This is a code that is supposed to be a unique identifier, thereby enabling the host computer to differentiate between ten accesses by one user and ten accesses by ten users. There are hundreds of reasons why this means of tallying does not really work but I'll cite two…
First: Counters are configured to track by a certain "no repeat" pattern. They don't want you to count as 100 hits if you sit there and reload the same page 100 times in a row. Therefore, they only record repeat I.P. addresses if a certain interval of time has passed between them. The trouble is that one counter might count a new "hit" if you access the page again after five minutes, whereas another counter might insist on an hour. Ergo, two counters on two different sites could be playing by completely different rules.
Second: More people access the web via America On-Line than any other Internet Service Provider. For its own quaint reasons, AOL assigns I.P. numbers from a limited pool. Thus, a thousand people who are simultaneously accessing the Internet via AOL could have the same I.P. number at the same time and, if they all access the same site, they could be counted as one person.
The unreliability of counters is so obvious that one company offers a service they call Fake Counter, which puts a counter on your web page that generates a completely random number. Here's a Fake Counter and, as you'll see if you reload this page repeatedly, it gives you a meaningless, non-sequential statistic every time…
Nevertheless, just as people overlook the margin of error or vagueness of questioning in polls when it serves their purpose, we pretend web counters actually count. So I thank all of you for publicizing this site and for giving me the completely illogical feeling of pride I will feel when we top 200,000…and then, in less than two months, when we top a quarter of a million.