Jonathan V. Last, online editor
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THE MAY/JUNE ISSUE of the Columbia Journalism Review has a sidebar that lists political magazine websites and their traffic numbers. For some reason this bit of text has been given a lot of attention as various sites bicker about the numbers and who's got more traffic and blah blah blah. (Everyone seems to have ignored the point of the main article: that Jonah Goldberg is a really smart guy who runs a really great website over at NRO.)
Anyway, the sidebar reported that, according to Jupiter Media Metrix, we get 247,000 unique visitors a month here at weeklystandard.com. This isn't quite right. The truth, such as we can divine it, is that since we re-launched last fall, we've never had a month with as few as 247,000 unique visitors, and currently we're getting about 570,000 unique visitors who call up about 9.3 million page views a month. CJR made a good-faith effort to get this stuff right. (One of its reporters called me asking for our numbers and I didn't want to give them out at the time; being somewhat new to the web, I thought it might be gauche. Little did I know.) The fact that CJR wound up confusing things only points to how gelatinous all of this talk about web statistics is. Let me try to explain.
Years ago there was no consensus on what measurement to use for web traffic. Most people relied on "hits." But a hit is just a file being called out from a server. If
you have a page with 25 image files on it, every time someone comes to that page you get 25 hits. I know one web lass who's constantly bragging about how her site gets a million hits a month, but she has 49 files on her homepage, so the truth is that even at the theoretical best, her site only gets 20,408 readers a month (that is, if each user comes to her home page only once and never clicks on anything else).
Those aware of these distinctions don't use hits anymore. They look at "visits," "unique visitors," and "page views." A "visit" is any time a user comes to a site. If the same user comes to a site 10 times in a day, he logs in 10 visits--even if he views 50 pages during each visit. A "unique visitor" is a measure that counts the different people who come to a site. But for a variety of technical reasons that I won't bore you with, this isn't an absolute measure and uniques can be easily over-counted depending on whether or not the visitors log on from multiple computers and also on the protocols their ISPs use. Finally, a "page view" is the number of pages which have been requested from a server. The page view is the simplest measure, and therefore probably the most reliable, but it, too, is imperfect. All pages from the site count equally, from the "search" page to the actual content, so a big multi-page site (like Salon) will get proportionally more page views per visitor than a smaller single-page site (like a blog).
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