Web counter

From ArticleWorld

The web counter also known as a hit counter is a software designed to monitor the number of visits a site has either by counting the number of files accessed or the number of unique addresses that sent HTTP requests to the server.

Description

The web counter is usually incorporated in a website by displaying it as an inline generated image that shows the number or more recently it is only showed to the webmaster himself through some techniques ranging from hidden links to password protected areas. The counter also contains a date on which it was started.

The decline

The trend nowadays is to replace the traditional hit counter with more advanced techniques of web traffic analysis. Also the web counters are notoriously untrustworthy as they can easily be hampered with either by the webmaster who will artificially try to inflate it or even by the program itself which sometimes counts the refreshes as unique hits. Other reasons have also contributed to the counter’s demise. The most important of them is the need for business privacy; many online web sites don’t want to show this kind of statistics as they regard it as a trade secret. Also the fashion of commercial has changed drastically and a web counter is no longer seen as a part of a professional website. On the other side of the spectrum small sites are not extremely keen on showing the low number of hits they get. But still with all these cons web counters are still used on internet today and many companies continue to offer them for free in exchange for publicity. The market though has been seriously reduced to personal websites and “old school” websites.