1. Terminology
The features we are interested in often come under various names.
a. VISITORS. These are usually counted by the distinct host (ISP) under which they visit the site.
Some counters only count each 'unique' visitor only once.
b. DOCUMENTS. In internet language these are often called 'pages'. But one printed document can have many (printed) pages, so we prefer the term 'document'.
Counters also mention the number of 'HITS' or 'REQUESTS'. However, this entitity can be misleading. Every time the browser picks up an element of a document, it makes a 'hit'. If a document contains 4 images, it will total 5 'hits'.
To give you an idea of numbers: during a typical month at the start of 2009, our website received 98,000 visitors who read 1120,000 documents causing 3270,000 hits (all in round figures).
2. Working out the numbers
At the moment we receive information about numbers from the following sources:
i. detailed statistical analysis by our service provider
ii. a visible minute-by-minute counter which does not cover all areas of our website, but which gives a fair idea of frequency -- see here!
iii. a counter linked to our discussion board CIRCLES. This shows how many people have visited CIRCLES during the past half hour -- see here!
iv. a geographic counter that shows who is online at the very moment and how many unique visitors from which cities visited the website over the past 24 hours -- see here!
The information is impressive and yet there is a problem! All these counters look at what is happening on the web server of our service provider where our website resides. They provide our home statistics. But that only shows half the picture. Because in actual fact, through so-called web caches [pronounced 'web cashes'] , people access the documents belonging to our website also from other sources, from virtual 'mirror sites' that hold our documents.
To understand how this works, consider this. Our website resides in London, UK. Since many people in the USA want our material, there is a constant demand for our documents which in normal circumstances would have to flow forwards and backwards over the Atlantic ocean, narrowing international bandwidth. The Internet in the USA therefore keeps frequently requested documents in local [USA] caches. The same applies to other countries and continents. They use web caches, also called 'intermediaries', to ease web flow. They regularly check the original website to see whether documents have changed. You can find more information about web caching here.
It is impossible at the moment to obtain exact information on which documents are held in which web caches anywhere in the world. Even less possible to find out how often, and by whom, these documents are read. As Jeffrey Goldberg puts it: 'Caches are essential for the web and disastrous for statistics'.
Cache statistics can be worked out, however, by probes and by knowledge of the norms. Priority caching applies to:
* Highly frequented sites
like ours.
* For visitors from regions with high internet usage, like the USA, Europe.
* Static documents that are not often changed - unlike news sites.
Collating all such information we can work out a quite accurate estimate of the total numbers involved each year. Examine our latest statistics here.
3. Country of origin
Another feature of great interest to us is the wide geographical spread of visitors to our website. Again, information comes from our various counters:
i. The statistical feedback from our service provider contains exact figures for countries of origin based on the country extension of the ISP URL. It also tells us how many people read the documents in each of our 24 language sections.
ii. The minute-by-minute counter, which does not cover the whole website, provides country of origin data for all unique visitors since 19 September 2008 -- see here!
iii. The geographic counter supplements this information in a number of ways -- see here!
But even here web caching distorts the overall picture. Moreover, some countries which have no good local web caches may go directly to our website, whereas countries with good local web caches access cached documents and are thus underrepresented in the website statistics.
Anyway, combining the data from our various sources, we know that we receive visitors from 209 countries. The top twenty countries are at present the following:
1. USA |
6. Netherlands |
11. UK |
16. Mexico |
|---|---|---|---|
2. Italy |
7. Australia |
12. Belgium |
17. Spain |
3. France |
8. Poland |
13. Brazil |
18. Philippines |
4. Canada |
9. Russia |
14. Ireland |
19. Colombia |
5. Germany |
10. Austria |
15. Japan |
20. India |
At the moment we offer 25 languages on our website. The languages spoken by visitors from our top twenty countries are: English, Italian, French, German, Dutch, Polish and Spanish. Other languages are: Portuguese (Brazil), Japanese, Tagalog (Philippines) and Malayalam & Urdu (India).
