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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.
The 10 was a hypothetical...the only point was that you can't trust the number of recurring visitors that a site reports because they users come back with a different IP (obvious) and get counted twice. Couldn't one use cookies and IPs in combination to get a better gauge? The IP may change but the cookie would not. Sure some may delete it, but it'll still improve accuracy at least a little bit.
So, he's saying my website has 1/10th of a visitor?
This guy's the limit!
I help keep this in balance by using my neighbor's wireless, that IP has a load of unique users.
Can he find a formula for the number of /. articles posted vs. the actual unique articles?
This argument is flawed. Logging to Slashdot now from my house and two hours from now from my friend's house should count for two visits, and so it rightfully does. The article writer seemed to have a problem with this? ZOMG 2 different IPs...
And if my IP has changed but I'm still here... that's because I haven't surfed for many hours at least otherwise the lease will be renewed and the address will stay the same. So it should still count for two visits. Duh.
Global warming is a cube.
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.
Last line of article: "So do not trust stats, they ARE inflated." Like I have always heard in regards to statistics: "Statistics are like loose women. You can do whatever you want with them" Although I don't suppose most of us on Slashdot would know much about women, let alone loose ones...
I'm not clever enough for a sig...
First of all, a DHCP server is typically going to give you the same IP address each time your computer requests it, unless there are more users than IP addresses, in which case there will be some shuffling. But that tends to be when there are more users than available IPs.
There are entire domains hidden behind a NAT device of some sort. This would be many users per IP address. TFA didn't mention this at all.
So I think TFA is indeed arbitrary, and also wrong.
bp
Yes...
But 37.5% of all stats presented by people are made up on the fly.
Only about 2.31% of people know that by adding numbers after the decimal point the average person considers the number "more credible".
I'm a fiscal conservative, it's a pity we don't have a political party anymore
No, most of the major ISPs just have an agreement with someone like Level3.net that handles dialin for them, and they only do caching for customers who pay for "high speed dialup" which is to say browsing through caching proxies that degrade image quality in order to reduce bandwidth consumption due to page loads.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
"Don't trust Stats. Except mine..."
It's that this is a Marketing Person who has realised that IP != Unique User.
That places him amongst a tiny minority of marketing people, even if his reasoning and ideas on methodology are just as batshit insane as the rest of his kin.
-EvilMagnus
AOL user's actual IPs do not change mid-session, but the web proxy server that is making requests on behalf of the user changes all the time; my server logs even show certain objects on a single page for the same user are requested by different cache-*.aol.com servers.
Lots of info about that is here.. including the proxy IP list, etc... http://webmaster.info.aol.com/proxyinfo.html they say specfically "When a member requests multiple documents for multiple URLs, each request may come from a different proxy server. Since one proxy server can have multiple members going to one site, webmasters should not make assumptions about the relationship between members and proxy servers when designing their web site."
I did a quick analysis of a 250,000 line entry server log. I counted unique ip addresses, unique useragent cgi values, and then the number of unique combinations.
A useragent value looks like this: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows 98;
Although even this is hardly reliable since useragent can be faked, and useragent isn't unique enough to be a client fingerprint -- its still helpful in this context.
One can make the assumption that a given user's "useragent" value isn't going to to change much on a day to day basis, though it will not stay the same over time as vesions get updated. GENERALLY speaking, the same IP address but different USERAGENT values would indicate different people from behind the same NAT firewall, or different users assigned the same DHCP address.
Here's what I got for results -- it looked like counting only unique IP's gave you only about 85% of the unique hits.
Total Hits Looked At: 249861
Unique IPs: 10309
Unique UAs: 1578
Unique Combos: 12232
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
My IP has been 127.0.0.1 for a really long time now. Ever since I got my first internet connection, actually. That must be why it's such a "nice" number and not those horribly complicated ones other people always seem to have.