Slashdot Mirror
Unique Visitors = 1/10th of Unique IPs?
Max Fomitchev submitted a little blog entry where he proposes that the ratio of unique IPs to actual unique users is 10:1. This flies in the face of the numbers you usually see attached to these sorts of things. I'm not sure about the logic he uses to come up with these numbers either.
I forgot something.
What about the other way?
Do they see the 10 people on the office NAT as one IP ?!?
That would skew it in the other direction and average things out wouldn't it? Now 10 is definately excessive.
Couldn't one use cookies and IPs in combination to get a better gauge?
No. What happens when I visit the website from work, or from a library? What happens when I reinstall Windows? What happens if I disable cookies? What happens when my girlfriend uses my computer to visit your site?
Web statistics can only be trusted to measure server state. To measure things like number of visitors, browser marketshare, etc, you need to obtain your data by other means, e.g. surveys. If you try and use what your server sees to obtain this information, then not only will your statistics be wildly skewed, but they'll be skewed by an unknowable amount, making them absolutely useless.
People who proudly trumpet web statistics are ignorant. Some of them are wilfully ignorant - i.e. they'll try and say that if the numbers can be biased in both directions (i.e. you can undercount and overcount), then they cancel each other out. I refuse to believe anybody could actually be that stupid, so I tend to assume they are just sticking their heads in the sand because they like to believe the numbers, no matter how mistaken they are.
Every time I post this, I always get a bunch of people modding me down and complaining because I offended them by questioning their sacred web statistics. "How dare you say I didn't get three dozen visitors to my blog last week!" I really don't understand this unhealthy attachment to meaningless numbers.
No joke, we have 800 people going out over one IP from here. Kinda a pisser when I hit the 'slow down cowboy! you just posted' message. As much as the stats are inflated by dynamic IPs and multiple logon points, they are deflated by NAT and Proxies.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
My experience is that a lot of users use cookie killing software that removes cookies every time the browser is closed or just reject cookies altogether.
My bet would be in the grand internetscape, this number of users is actually quite small and that most do not reject or remove cookies (at least not often).
However, the point was a better gauge, not a perfect one. Requiring login would resolve most issues of users from different locations or even multiple users on the same computer, but few people are going to like a website they can't browse anonymously.
I think it's just interesting data for site owners and nothing more. I wouldn't overanalyze some site touting 3000 unique visitors a day or something.