Reader Lear suggested that I put up the number of unique visitors to my blog. I love statistics, so I'm happy to oblige. You have to keep in mind, however, that if the same person accesses a site from, say, three different computers, s/he will count as 3 unique visitors. Statcounters count unique IP-addresses and have no way of knowing how many people are associated with each IP-address or how many IP-addresses one person is associated with.
And now I promise to stop bugging everybody with blogging stats for a while.
5 comments:
it goes even further than the one IP per user. Everytime you establish a new internet connection with your provider, you get assigned a random IP adress.
Providers also disconnect long standing internet connections (internet flatrates) every 24 hours.
If we assume that every user on your blog uses just one device, has a DSL line that is only disconnected every 24 hours and checks your blog at least once every day, then you had 228 unique readers following your blog.
Truth is, the number is probably even lower because most people have more than just one device they use daily. I for example usually use a Desktop PC at home, a Laptop at work, a netbook at the university and my iPhone everywhere.
That would be 4 IPs for just one person. And that still does not take into consideration that internet connections, especially for mobile phones connect and disconnect more often.
It might even be imaginable that just one person is responsible for the majority of the unique ips by just reconnecting to the internet, opening your blog and then rinse and repeat.
No, Tim, that isn't how it works at all. You are judging everybody by yourself who is a regular reader but people are a lot more unpredictable than that.
There are people who come just once for a specific book review. There is a reader who came back 147 times for the same book review. (Go figure.) There are people who come on a regular basis for several months and then disappear forever. Or people who come assiduously for just one discussion and move away when it's over. As a result, actual unique visitors who have been around are in 10,000s. However, such calculations can never take into account the entire variety of human reaction to things. This is why initially I (and every other blogger) goes with the number of pageviews.
Well, after a few days of its being blank, I can read the counter again!
Yeah, I just wanted to say that using unique IP adresses to determine actual readership is not as reliable as it may seem at the beginning.
True, Tim. I have read this blog from at least six different locations over the past six months. And, I don;t have the capability to do it from a mobile device.
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