Congratulations! You're the 4,326,973rd Unique Visitor!
or
What the Web Meter Services Won't Tell You

Talk to anybody who runs a Web site, from Grandma Gertie to a Yahoo! exec, and you'll soon hear some number that's supposedly a tally of the people who've visited the site in the last week. "We've had 5 trillion
unique visitors," or "my site has handled 2 billion transactions," or "our server crashed we had so many visitors last week." Yeah, sure.

You'd think that with high technology, a simple task like measuring the popularity of Web sites would be a breeze. Unfortunately, as with many other high-tech advances, what could be a simple task soon gets bogged
down with competing standards, name-calling, and all-out chaos. Such is the case with Web popularity, now measured with hits, visitors, unique visitors, browsers, peepers and accidental tourists.

Rather than tell you what a load of crap all these numbers are, we've spent almost two hours researching the methodology of various metering services, and we've found they employ some, uh, questionable techniques. Here are what they say they do, and what they really do:

* Irrelevant Knowledge Snoopers

Company line: Takes a "random sample" of Web surfers and meters their Net sessions. These numbers are extrapolated to the entire audience of Web surfers.

Reality: Some guy picks up a local phone book and drops his finger on a few names. The group is rounded out with family, friends and the highest-bidding Web sites (who meter users at their company). Though the sampling method mimicks TV ratings, Web surfers behave very differently, and the vast amount of sites is difficult to scale like TV shows.

* Greatest Hits Counters

Company line: This tool lets you post the number of hits your site generates.

Reality: Your "Danny Bonaduce is God" site's 64,369 hits came from yourself, your friends who wanted to get a laugh at your expense, your coworkers who were wondering why you weren't doing any work lately, Danny Bonaduce, Danny Bonaduce's agent, and 64,362 search engine spider bots that are constantly taking inventory of the Web.

* MeBeDum Matrix

Company line: Sends out surveys to Web surfers, who fill out what sites they've visited to extrapolate "unique" visitors to each site on the Web.

Reality: Only about .005 percent of people bother filling in the surveys, and of those, about 75 percent are either guessing or making it up. How anyone could possibly remember what sites they've visited in the past week or even past hour is beyond comprehension. The uniqueness of the visitors is that they were foolish enough to think filling out the survey would accomplish something.

* Neil's Son New Media Ratings

Company Line: A sophisticated real-time tally of in-tab single-digit sampling done during peak-efficiency online synergistic activity.

Reality: Basically what Neil's son likes today. If he pokes around at Disney, that site wins a large rating; if he checks out some porno, those sites top the list; if he doesn't log on, the Web has had a horrible day.

In the Wild West of Web rating services, anything goes. So why not come up with your own service today? With all the bloated numbers floating around, you have as good a chance as anyone at being the "Nielsens of
the Web."

********** DeathRace 2000(tm)

[each week we'll highlight the lowlights at one of three failing online ventures: Snap!, HotWired and Slate]

At Snap: First Free Pizza, Now Free Email

In order to stem the tide of vacating employees and execs, CNET's Snap! service started to give employees free pizza for lunch every Friday. Now comes word from Wired News that the CNET portal-wannabe has added free
email to its site, with a three-year partnership with iName. The free Web-based Snap-branded email service will launch mid-June and CNET will get an equity position in iName, according to Wired. Though they're
about the last portal to add free email, it's a sign that they're at least trying to keep up. Now let's see if Halsey Minor will offer "Free Tips on Winning Friends and Influencing People in Washington." Nah, those are trade secrets...

[Follow the DeathRace online at: http://www.mediawhore.com/deathrace]
 

"3-Minute Roast" is a weekly, advertisement-free, opinionated rip on anything that strikes our fancy in the online world.

Max Schlickting - Editor-in-Chief
Barbara Yalpsid - Online Editor
Lefty Periwinkle - First Amendment Expert

* If you hate our rantings, send a reply message: "Numbers, numbers, no more numbers!" and we'll take you off the list.
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* The material is the exclusive copyright of Web Liars Anonymous, whose members must say "I'll never compare my site's numbers to Yahoo's again!" five times fast.
* Feel free to forward this to three friends or enemies. Some call it a pyramid scheme; we call it distribution.

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