(Note to literalists: the Watched column presently contains only a smattering of 'warblogs' because the facilitator of the template-change--Dr. Menlo--is not very familiar with them, and will be adding more as they are sent to him. Also, this blog may contain areas of allusion, satire, subtext, context and possibly even a dash of the surreal: wannabe lit-crits beware.)
Control
[Watch this space for: Pentagon and Petroleum, The Media is only as Liberal as the Corporations Who Own Them, Wash Down With, and Recalcify]
WARBLOGGER WATCH
Thursday, June 20, 2002
PENIS WARS CONTINUE: Richard Hailey has taken on my mathematic analysis. Let's take a look at it.
Firstly, remember hits are a different issue to Unique Viewers. Hits are the number of times a page is visited. Unique Viewers are the number of people who visit the site. The number of Unique Viewers is ALWAYS lower than the number of hits (for obvious reasons).
Secondly, all the figures came from the Extreme Tracking figures:
The main reason Richard's numbers differ so greatly from mine is that he is taking the current month's project figures, whereas I'm using the average figures. This month seems to be an exception (due to some major referrers (who will be one-hit-wonders), and will eventually affect the average. As he noted, my estimates were very rough and didn't exactly match the averages.
However, my very good friend Jeff pointed something else out to me.
"The flaws in Extreme Tracking have a lot to do with the etremely inflated unique monthly visitors count. As you note, unique visitors and unique IP addresses are 2 very different things. But look at his daily & weekly #s for this week (12:20 pm):
5,389 + 17,130 = 22,519. Not accounting for dynamic IP addresses, the only way those could be 22,519 different individuals is if none of the 17,130 from Monday returned on Tuesday. Not likely. Extreme shows 427,260 uniques over the past 29 days. That works out to about 14,733 per day over the course of a month. Given that his daily average is shown as 14,733, it seems quite obvious that Extreme Tracking doesn't count monthly uniques - it takes the daily uniques across the entire month and adds them together to arrive at the monthly unique total. The only way that 427,260 number could be accurate was if each day 14,733 new visitors came to his site once and never came back again. Jeff"
In other words, the weekly and monthly figures are COMPLETELY FLAWED.
This makes it nigh-on impossible to find how many repeaters there really are.
But...
Using Richard's maths, Insnayapundit gets on average 225691 hits on average per month. So 225691/30 should equal 7523 hits a day. Why doesn't that match the average uniques? Why is it less? Isn't that a sheer impossibility?
But nevermind... We'll keep going.
7523 multiplied by 8% gives 602 for AOL users. Applying the AOL factor of 3, we can assume that 1805 (Richard multiplied wrong on his page, multiplying by 2). 7523-1805 = 5718. At the upper AOL level of 14% that leaves 4363.
So those figures show 4363 - 5718, well within my 3000-8000 range.