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Delete Cookies, Inflate Net Traffic Estimates

Posted by kdawson on from the throwing-them-off dept.

eldavojohn writes "In my browser, I regularly go to the tools menu and clear my private data. This includes my cookies. As a result, people like me who destroy cookies by the thousands may be inflating estimates of Web traffic by up to 150 percent. People have good reasons for clearing out cookies — we've heard about bad cookies before (and I think the FCC is still investigating the issue). But every time you delete cookies, many of the sites you've visited count you as a new visitor next time."

6 of 217 comments (clear)

  1. 150%? by catbutt · · Score: 5, Informative

    That assumes an awful lot of people do that.

    I don't do it because it is a pain to constantly log back in everywhere. But I seriously doubt more than 2% of the non-slashdot crowd does it.

  2. Re:On the other hand... by dattaway · · Score: 5, Interesting

    and be sure to set your browser to "googlebot"

    That way no one has visited but another web spider!

  3. Re:On the other hand... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    I just forward all my cookies on to Santa - I get good presents

  4. Every time you delete cookies... by chinard · · Score: 5, Funny

    ...god kills a kitten!

    1. Re:Every time you delete cookies... by DreamerFi · · Score: 5, Funny
      Approximately 70,000 dogs and cats are born in the U.S. each day, or 25,567,500 each year. Of these, roughly 54%, or 13,806,450, are cats. Since 34.5% of cats don't live to see their first birthday, we can assume that about 4,763,225 kittens die each year in the United States alone. We'll take for granted that God in His divine Wisdom purposely smote each of these kittens.

      Let's assume that the idiom is talking only about male masturbation. Let's further assume, highly conservatively, that males do not start masturbating until they reach age 15. Of the total U.S. male population, 107,199,356 would then be masturbation-age males. Again, let's conservatively estimate that teenagers masturbate no more frequently than adults, and that all men masturbate an average of 20 times each month or 240 times per year. This means that each man in the United States masturbates approximately every 1.5 days. It also means that there are approximately 25,727,845,440 male masturbation sessions in the United States each year.

      There are nearly 26 billion male masturbation sessions in the U.S., yet there are fewer than five million kitten deaths annually. Far from a one-to-one correlation, there are 5401.5 masturbation sessions for every single kitten death. This means that the average American man can masturbate regularly for 22.5 years before he is responsible for the death of a single kitten. Indeed, with a life expectancy of less than 75 years, the average man will be responsible for only two or three kitten deaths in a lifetime of vigorous masturbation.

  5. Re:On the other hand... by Goldenhawk · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Hmmm. I wonder if this inflates the apparent popularity of Firefox (not that I consider that a bad thing, mind you).

    After all,

    1) it's geeks who tend to both use FF *and* block cookies
    2) the FF extension architecture makes it easy to use selective cookie blocking tools
    3) FF settings allow automatic cookie deletion each time it exits, unlike IE (=IE6, at least)

    All in all, I suspect that (*IF* the subject article is accurate) FF users probably account for a disproportionately large chunk of those "re-visits".

    I bet M$FT hates that.

    --
    --Brandon / Split Infinity Music