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Please, Get Your Facts Straight!

I think Drinking Liberally in New Milford had one too many this evening.  Here is yet another blogger on the extreme left making accusations before thinking.  

He claims that we are lying about the fact that we received 350,000 hits last month.  And then goes on to compare our hits number with another sites views number.  You can’t compare hits to views, they’re two different things.  It’s really pretty amazing that he wouldn’t check this before accusing us of lying.

Here are the statistics straight from our stat page:

Nov 2006

  1. Unique visitors: 3823
  2. Visits: 7698
  3. Views: 32403
  4. Hits: 358945 9.03 GB

An apology may be in order here. Perhaps he thinks that hits are not the best indicator of readership.  The more I learn, the more I agree with that.  But, please, don’t accuse someone of lying without taking some basic steps to get your facts straight.

P.S. Drinking Liberally still can’t admit to the fact that he was wrong, plain and simple.

I am therefore including a link to a screenshot of our statistics (following Spazeboy’s advice, who has been the most civil in this discussion) that shows clearly we were not lying. Period. We never lied, attempted to deceive, or distorted the numbers. Drinking Liberally got it completely wrong.

http://archive.ctfamily.org/ctfamily.statistics.gif

I put up the hits number because I have seen that on other sites. As I said in the post, the more I have learned on what hits mean the less I believe that they are an accurate depiction of site usage. From now on we will refer to page views. (For anyone bored enough, the discussion in the site below highlights the differences between page views and hits.)

http://www.podcastpickle.com/forums/lofiversion/index.php/t4677.html

Drinking Liberally needs to think a bit more before he attacks people as “pious frauds,” “hipocrites” [sic], and “immoral fraudsters”.

We will be putting a free sitemeter up soon.

Yours,

Brian

9 Responses to “Please, Get Your Facts Straight!”

  1. on 06 Dec 2006 at 6:24 pmStephen

    If you are not getting page views even close to the 350,000 number it is impossible for you to be getting the hits. Put your sitemeter on the net and let it tell the truth.

    As For now, the graphics I linked out speak the obvious truth. You don’t have the traffic to support claims of those numbers.

    In fact the stats suggest your site is in decline. But your post says you are growing? Mighty confusing, eh?

    Also much of the traffic to your site is the same/similar traffic that goes to all of the “Family Institute” sister sites in other states. Suggesting that much of your traffic is likely from out of State.

    I linked out to unbiased Blog tracking sites. Just because you say something does not make it true. Prove me wrong and I will amend or retract the post.

  2. on 06 Dec 2006 at 8:27 pmYawn

    As I’m sure you are aware, “hits” are a useless and misleading measure of site traffic used by marginal organizations like yours to mislead people into thinking you have, say, 300,000 visitors or visits or page views or anything that actually means something, unlike “hits.” (For those who aren’t familiar with the jargon, viewing even one page on a site can count as several “hits,” so dishonest webmasters love to brag about this meaningless statistic.) So perhaps you should apologize to your visitors for misleading them with silly and irrelevant statistics.

  3. on 07 Dec 2006 at 5:25 amspazeboy

    What might clear this up, is posting a screenshot of your stats page.

    My guess is that the 358,945 hits are cumulative over the entire time that this site has been online.

    And are we talking about stats for your blog, or for the entire website?

    If you don’t want to post a screenshot, get a free sitemeter, put it on the blog, and after a month we should have a pretty good idea of how many hits, page views, etc. that this blog receives.

    Your claim is very high, don’t expect anyone to take you at your word when it would be so easy for you to prove.

  4. on 07 Dec 2006 at 8:08 amBrian

    Drinking Liberally still can’t admit to the fact that he was wrong, plain and simple.

    I am therefore including a link to a screenshot of our statistics (following Spazeboy’s advice, who has been the most civil in this discussion) that shows clearly we were not lying. Period. We never lied, attempted to deceive, or distorted the numbers. Drinking Liberally got it completely wrong.

    http://www.ctfamily.org/ctfamily.statistics.gif

    I put up the hits number because I have seen that on other sites. As I said in the post, the more I have learned on what hits mean the less I believe that they are an accurate depiction of site usage. From now on we will refer to page views. (For anyone bored enough, the discussion in the site below highlights the differences between page views and hits.)

    http://www.podcastpickle.com/forums/lofiversion/index.php/t4677.html

    Drinking Liberally needs to think a bit more before he attacks people as “pious frauds,” “hipocrites” [sic], and “immoral fraudsters”.

    We will be putting a free sitemeter up soon.

    Yours,

    Brian

  5. on 07 Dec 2006 at 9:36 amctblogger

    Hello guys,

    Look, let me be short. There is simply no way you received 350,000 hits on your site. I don’t know what you stat service you use but go to my site and simply read what I have to say on the matter.

    http://connecticutblog.blogspot.com/2006/12/family-institute-of-connecticut-claims.html

    Drinking liberally used Alexia to track your site which is probably the best service in terms of tracking traffic on major sites and it clearly shows that my site has more traffic than yours (and I’m not close as more viewed than CTLP or MLN).

    CTLP and MLN are the most viewed blogs in Connecticut (this is not in dispute). My site probably holds the record in number among blogs in the number of hits in one day which is about 120,000. Now, this was in the middle of the Lieberman/Lamont race and my post generated so much interest that it was linked by four of the most popular blogs in the country (DailyKos, MyDD, Crooks and Liars, RAW Story).

    Before attacking Drinking Liberally, take a moment and double check what your saying. Even you have admitted that you might understand the terminology on your stats; therefore, you can’t call Drinking a liar. As my very detailed post indicated, he is completely correct.

    http://connecticutblog.blogspot.com/2006/12/family-institute-of-connecticut-claims.html

    Trust me, I’m not attacking you, I’m just setting the record straight.

  6. on 07 Dec 2006 at 11:01 amStephen

    The fact is that I am not wrong Brian. The stats you put up there prove that.

    Page views is not an accurate count either.

    # Unique visitors: 3823
    the number of different computers with unique IDs that have connected to your site. A semi-decent way to figure out your actual readership.

    # Visits: 7698
    The number of times people have made visits to your site. In otherwords: Your real “Hit Count”

    # Views: 32403
    Suggests that the people that come to your site may read about 5 pages per visit, but not a very scientific reading since scrolling by a post can make it a pageview.

    Pleas don’t ask me to apologize for ponting out facts, and I suggest you reconsider trying to label me as drunk for pointing out what is a common deception used by many Bloggers to “over-inflate” their numbers.

    I believe that you owe your readership an apology for making misleading statements about your site.

  7. on 07 Dec 2006 at 11:29 amMatt Browner Hamlin

    Brian –
    Can you tell me what the Drinking Liberally blog is wrong about? You claimed to be getting 350,000 hits a month and implied that it was stratospheric traffic. You’ve admitted that you were wrong and you in fact are only getting about 3,800 visitors a month.

    So admitting that you were citing the wrong number and your critics were right, what is the DL blog wrong about?

  8. on 08 Dec 2006 at 5:25 amBrian

    Matt, Stephen, and ctblogger,

    Drinking Liberally is 100% wrong in saying that we lied about our statistics. You can see that from the screenshot link I posted above. I see exactly what you see: over 350,000 hits.

    Look at the page and confine yourself to one question at a time. Did we lie about our hits? No. Therefore, Drinking Liberally was wrong in all of his over-the-top accusations of lying and fraud.

    I already have stated that the more I learned about what hits means the more I think page views is a more accurate number. There is no argument there. But Drinking Liberally did not base his post on the idea that hits were not the best representation of readership. He said we lied about the hits number. Again that is simply false. I have not admitted any such thing that my critics were right that we were lying. They were not.

    I will reiterate. We used the hits number because (as you can see from the screenshot) that was the most prominent number on our stats page. If this number was meaningless why would it be included on our stats page at all? I did not know the distinctions between “hits” and “views” at the time, and given many of your arguments, you didn’t either. Now that I do know, we will use page views (contra Drinking Liberally, most agree that page views are a good number to use.)

  9. on 08 Dec 2006 at 12:34 pmctblogger

    Your stats are inaccurate as there is NO way you received more hits than any of the other blogs in the state. In fact, based on your “stats,” this blog would be one of the largest in the country.

    He called you a liar, I’m calling you dishonest since you have no idea what stats are about (by your own acknowledgment) then you feel the need to attack the messenger when faced with the facts.

    My post clearly outlined the difference between view, and a hit and again, anyone who knows anything about blog stats will tell you that your stats are completely wrong as there is NO WAY 3823 people hit your site 358945 times.

    If you don’t understand stats, maybe you should learn more about the topic before making claims in a post. In any regard, since you have site meter, we’ll keep an eye on you…

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