I remember reading a while back about the Lisa Dorrian website and the attention it had attracted. I first read about it on Slugger O’Toole and everyone seemed very impressed by their headline grabbing “5 million hits in a month”. The news was everywhere but as I pointed out on Slugger at the time, the Lisa Dorrian website is poorly designed leading to such a high number of hits - many of the pages will generate 50 plus hits, about 5 times what is necessary!

The subject of measuring a websites performance arose again recently on the Ben Goldacre’s excellent BadScience Blog. Ben blogged how he had recieved 2 million hits and one of the commentators provided a great link to an article on evHead entitled Page views are obsolete. According to this article many advertising companies now reject the Page Views stats for a website as they aren’t a fair relection on the site’s reach. Instead the unique views stat is better for gauging the reach by recording the number of different users on a given site. As an example the article compares MySpace with Blogger. On hits and page views MySpace wins hands down but on unique visits Blogger is slightly ahead.

Even with this stat things aren’t completely straightforward - it may be that certain advertisers don’t need a huge reach and would rather focus their marketing on a certain demographic like you might find on MySpace.

Anyway one thing is for sure; headline grabbing figures in isolation rarely tell us much and it’s only when we see the whole picture that we can start to gauge a sites popularity.