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Quantity Equals Quality
My Encounters With Hit Counters

25 August 2006

In all my blogsites (vs websites), and there are too many as to be unbelievable so I won’t list them down, I have been using Bravenet as my counter for Hits. I didn’t want to count Visits. I don’t want to discuss the difference between Hits and Visits generally because it will take a long time, and specifically because ... please read on.

I started blogging in 1990, then I stopped abruptly. I don’t know why. Then I resumed blogging in 2005, with a frenzy. You don’t know what you’re missing until you have written a few posts or messages and realized the power of the Internet to publish to the world at large. Last year, I called blogging 'the revenge of the unpublished writer,' which I was.

I started with blogsites without a counter. I don’t remember when I first used the Bravenet counter, but I remember my excitement when the numbers went up and up and up. Some blogsites counted up agonizingly slow, and a handful counted up fast enough to please me. More and more visitors were coming to read what I have to say.

Then I tried to put in Google ads in all my favorite blogsites. I even put in Amazon items like iPod and Canon cameras. I was going to get a certain commission for every sale. After a few months, I noticed that I remained a loyal, non-commissioned official blogger, so I decided to delete all those ads in my blogsites. No harm done to my ego.

The other day, 23 August 2006, the thought suddenly occurred to me: a Hit or a Visit is statistics; with a counter in each of my blogsite, what I have been doing is putting value to all my writings in terms of Hits. The lower numbers had made me sadder; the higher numbers had made me gladder. My happiness depended on the numbers that Bravenet were giving me, on the number of Internet reads or calls on any of the pieces I have written. If the number the counter was showing was low, that told the world hardly anybody was reading me. Not good for the ego.

All over the (Internet) world, the number of Hits (or Visits or Page Views) has become a measure of value; quality is now being evaluated by quantity – which defies logic. The number of visitors to your site is the measure of the quality of your site. If my ideas are revolutionary or different and only a handful read them in the Internet, those numbers are telling me that my ideas are not important at all? I can’t accept that. If another blogsite shows 100,000 Hits and the highest I can show is 157 Hits, that shows the other guy is a better writer? You can’t expect me to accept that.

So: starting the other day, I deleted all those Bravenet counter codes in my Blogger Templates. They just happened to be Bravenet – I would have deleted them if they were Microsoft counter codes, which they were not. So, in case someone asks for commitment of any kind, henceforth I shall refuse to stand and be counted!

Apt image from Ya Ya who captions it 'Counting Pollen' (flickr.com).
The butterfly is doing the quantitative analysis - counting pollens.
The quality of the pollen is not the insect's concern;
the quality of the honey is your concern.