FANTASTIC!!! Birdman Website Reaches
32 MILLION HITS in March!

By John "Birdman" Bryant

CAUTION: As of Dec 2006, we have evidence that the 32 million hits statistic may be in error. For details, see December Update below

This is incredible news! We're getting more than a MILLION HITS A DAY!!! Jeff Rense's site, the behemoth rense.com, which gets a sockdollager Alexa rank of 3438, claims only 8 million hits per month -- just a quarter of what our Webalizer program shows for thebirdman.org. That may be compared with the Alexa rank for thebirdman.org, which is an in-the-toilet 262,714. But then we already know from an earlier analysis that Alexa is screwed up, probably intentionally. Furthermore, Alexa ratings are supplied by the people who have chosen to put the privacy-invading Alexa Toolbar in their browser, and those who read this website are probably too smart to do any such thing. In any event, an Alexa rating is at best a statistical inference from a skewed population, whereas a hit count is a direct measure of popularity.

But good news should always be carefully examined for 'false positives', and there are some. Our webhost, for example, doesn't think much of hit counts, because each picture on a page increases the hit count by 1. (A better statistic would seem to be page views, which in our case is virtually the same as hits (see chart below).) Our webhost likes 'visitors/day', a statistic which we unfortunately don't have, tho we do have total visits. But be that as it may, the hit count is a standard statistic for webmasters, and thereby allows a good comparison with other websites providing only that the numbers can be obtained.

And that is precisely what we attempted to do. In particular, we queried several other popular white liberationist sites for hit counts, but Stormfront and VNN did not answer, while Duke and Crosstar responded, but did not give clear answers, and we thought it impolitic to inquire further. A fifth inquiry was made to the irrepressible Hal Turner, who was courteous and accommodating. Interestingly, his stats showed only a very modest number of page views (similar to hit counts) -- less than half a million for March -- but a unique visitor count of one and a half times our (non-unique) visitor count, which evidently means that he has more visitors, but they don't read nearly as much. Or to put it another way, Hal attracts people more effectively than we do, but we educate them better. So there.

To be truthful, we ourselves found our stats so mind-boggling that we could not comprehend them at first -- our minds were simply not prepared for such good news. More to the point, we have rarely looked at our stats -- our first job has been to put out a page that was the best and most interesting on the Net -- or at least a page that we found most interesting by our own lights -- and to let the cow chips fall where they may. To which I might add that credit for the success of our page must go largely to our contributors, who seem to have a knack for finding the best and brightest stories available. But our success shows something else besides our contributors' indefatigability and good taste -- it shows that the Sleeping White Giant is beginning to wake up and realize who is screwing him in the u-no-what, and that this waking-up is proceeding at an ever-accelerating pace. We are not alone, and the credibility of the Movement is soaring. The people are speaking, and we can only repeat what our Latin teacher taught us: Vox populi, vox Dei!

Here is the chart which the Webalizer produced for us:

Usage Statistics for thebirdman.org

Summary Period: Last 12 Months
Generated 14-Apr-2006 07:20 CDT

CAUTION: Since posting these Webalizer statistics, we have discovered that these stats are inconsistent with the statistics of two other programs, one of which gives a significantly better result, the other a significantly worse one. In particular, the Analog program tallied what it called 'Redirected Requests' at 90 million for the month -- a number which, from the definition given by the program description, looked to be simply part of the hit count; while the Awstats program gave a hit count of less than a half-million. In consultation with our webhost we have not been able to resolve these inconsistencies, but even the lowest count is still a good one, even if considerably below the Webalizer result. But the real lesson here, so it seems, is that when there is no penalty for being wrong, or no way to check for wrongness, then programs, like people, are likely to go wrong.

December 2006 Update

[Birdman writes to webhoster Josh:]

Dear Josh:

In checking the stats for my page (thebirdman.org) using Webalizer, found at

http://67.18.22.68:2082/tmp/thebird/webalizer/index.html

I find that I am getting MANY fewer hits than I received when I was being hosted by Siteground, even tho Siteground also used the Webalizer program. More specifically, the Webalizer program at your site gave me a hit count of about 857,000 for the month of November, while the Webalizer program at Siteground gave me a hit count of almost 32 MILLION for the month of March. I retained the Siteground Webalizer chart, and you can view it here:

http://www.thebirdman.org/Index/Intro/Intro-BirdmanRanking.htm

Can you offer any explanation for this huge disparity?

Thanks.

-Birdman

[Josh replies:]

But judging from the surface, the count was plain weird to me too.

Because you certainly get more visits per day than before, but far less in total a month (which is what you were looking at).

Hits per day Dec 2006 27412 Nov 2006 28574 Apr 2006 1155221 Mar 2006 1019175

Visits per day Dec 2006 4020 Nov 2006 4811 Apr 2006 2767 Mar 2006 3201

So "more visits, less hits" , assuming all the information is true, a simple explanation would be, in the past many people of the same visit/IP/computer download and refresh your website over and over. Whereas now they either change locations or don't re-read your website more than they do (or you simply have more newer visitors)

From all experience, VISITS (aka UNIQUE visits) are far more important than hits, hits literally means somebody downloads your site (just because they feel like it), they can refresh it for any reason, if a person reads your site 10 times a day even if you didn't update it, your counter counts 10 hits, that means little compared to 10 VISITS of 10 different people reading your site for different reasons, difference places and different times.

Regards Josh

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