The ACM are claiming three million page views on their website, but over what time-frame? And why are visitor numbers not mentioned at all? Lewis Holden takes a sceptical view of the ACM’s latest website traffic statistics.
The basic to-and-fro of the Australian republic debate (and indeed elsewhere in the Commonwealth) has seen both sides claiming no-one cares about the views held by the other. The latest skirmish in this battle is over website traffic. The other day, I
pointed to the well-known Alexa traffic website as an example of the apparent levels of traffic the ACM's website is getting versus Independent Australia. It seems the leader of the ACM makes stuff up for the sake of generating traffic.
The ACM responded by
posting that they had received over 10 million hits per year. This is from the Google Urchin software running on their server. I'll come back to this number in a minute, because it was also claimed that Alexa is not an "accurate reporting tool". Sure, Alexa is not the greatest tool for measuring traffic. But it's not like the numbers just come out of thin air. Moreover, it's asserted that Alexa's traffic reports only come from users who have installed Alexa's toolbar in their browser.
This hasn't been the case since sometime in 2008. The website clearly states that its traffic rank is an estimate. However, even with large margins of error it's easy to see that Alexa is saying more people read this website.
Now, back to that 10m hits per year figure. For the ACM's benefit, I'm not accusing them of making the 10m figure up. The problem with "hits" is that they aren't really a good measure of traffic on a website. A "hit" is simply a record of every file being downloaded from a server by a browser. Websites being what they are these days, it's possible for a single "page" to contain over 1,000 hits. A page can contain hundreds of images, videos, audio, stylesheets, scripts, content and static content files downloaded that count as a "hit". Add to this the fact that a lot of web traffic is generated by "bots" - automated programs searching the web and crawling for content (which is how Google finds websites and ranks them). Then there's malware, posting and spamming websites, looking for security holes or other content, which generate a lot of web traffic. As a result it's generally accepted that
hits are not an accurate way to record traffic.
On the other hand, the ACM states they received 3.25m "page views". Page views are a much more accurate measure of traffic. They record an individual user viewing a "page" on a website, regardless of all the various images, text and other stuff being downloaded. However, the figure given is over an unspecified time. It's interesting that the time period for this is not disclosed, or even a graph of page views over time shown. For all we know the page views figure could be over five years, which makes the measure meaningless. I'm not accusing the ACM of withholding this information - but they do need to clarify what sort of time period we're talking about here.
And another thing, why doesn’t the ACM mention the the number of unique visitors that go on the site? This shows how many
different people visit the site, surely a vital statistic under the circumstances.
It seems that until we get some more information, we'll just have to defer to a slightly inaccurate, yet publicly available, traffic tool.
