Congratulations dear visitor number 2,000,000 on BKWine.com. The site recently counted its two millionth visitor!
Statistics on the internet is always a bit tricky. First, there is not really and totally (totally!) accurate way to measure web statistics. Secondly, most statistics is “private” so you just have to trust those who talks about their stats. Or not. There is no way to check and no “official” numbers.
In our case, at BKWine, we use among other things a service called StatCounter. It recently reported the 2,000,000th “unique visitor”. But we didn’t start counting until early 2005 and considering that we are on the internet since 1996 we probably in reality passed number 2M quite some time ago.
One should also be aware of the different types of numbers, e.g. unique visitors, page views and hits. Unique visitors is just that, a measure of how many people, based on certain assumptions, have visited the site and viewed at least one page.
A completely different number is hits. Hits used to be popular but is today actually quite irrelevant. It tells you how many “server requests” have been made which is basically how many files have been fetched. A web page can consist of many files: tens or even hundreds of files. Each html-file, each image, each icon etc is a file / hit.
Page views is a third measure that tells you how many web pages have been shown to a visitor: if a visitor clicks through three pages before leaving that makes for three page views. So if someone talks about their web statistics you should remember to ask what number they are actually talking about!
And we say a heart felt welcome to our unique visitor nr 2,000,000! Just as unique as everyone else!
