Is that page views or unique visitors?

That's page views. (warning: techie stuff ahead) In fact, page views is about the only thing you really can know online with any modicum of certainty.

When people claim "unique visitors," they're lying. Or, at least, misinformed. A "unique visitor" is a count of the number of IP addresses visiting a site. If everyone had a static IP address, it would be a fine statistic. But people don't. Most dialup users change IPs every time they dialup. It gets worse: AOL users cycle IPs during the course of a single session.

Given that AOL users make up roughly 25% of all traffic on the net, well, "unique visitors" is a completely bogus statistic.

Caveat: If your system uses cookies to identify repeat visitors across different IPs, well, you can at least know how many unique browsers visited your site.

One more disclaimer: Even "page views" can be a low count. Some ISPs (like AOL, Earthlink, and others) cache high-traffic pages on local servers. That means that some users will see the cached edition - not the live edition from the originating server. So, we should always treat "page views" as the bottom end of the count.

All that being true, most people in the blogosphere find "unique" viewers preferable; anyway, it's the traditional measure.

Page views can be misleading, however, since I think there isn't yet enough literacy on the various terms for the average reader to understand that "page views" doesn't mean "number of people." A "unique visitor" count isn't directly and exactly comparable to "number of people" either, but it's closer.

b!X -- Hmmm.... Well, the problem is that unique visitors is almost always a completely bogus count. Page views is just that: views of pages. It has nothing to do with people.

And, frankly, it's a better stat, too. Three people visiting one page each is different than three people visiting ten pages each.

Page views is the most important and most valid statistic. To learn more, read How the Web Works from Analog (the only stats program that doesn't lie.)

I finally ran Analog on Communique's logfiles from launch in December 2002 until today. Excluding successful page requests (presuming that's the stat you're using for page views) from my local network, the total appears to be 932,141.

For comparison purposes to this post regarding 10k at BlueOregon, Analog indicates that Communique did not hit 10,000 page views until sometime in its second full month of operation (Februrary 2003), as opposed to 9 days here.

So speaks the reigning "best blogger" according to Willamette Week!