Some of us have been up and down this discussion before on the Atticus forum. Opinion varies, even among the technical experts, on the real meaning of website 'hits' ie. converting them into 'real people'. From memory of past discussions, a 'hit' occurs with every 'refresh'. Or a 'hit' occurs each time an icon loads, so that a heavily badged up website will generate dozens of 'hits' from a single visit. Or many of the 'hits' and IP addresses are Googlebots and kindred search spiders that crawl across the web.
My favorite example of 'interpretation' comes from FIDE which trumpeted that, during the Kramnik-Topalov world championship match, its website was receiving an impressive 300 million
visitors a day. I don't think so. 'Hits' maybe, but not 'visitors'. I calculate as follows: assume a global population of 6bn, of which a third are asleep, and a third have no access to the internet. Of the remaining 2bn, assume 50% are too young, or don't play chess, or are out shopping/down the pub. That means FIDE believes 30% of the available global population was watching a chess game that day! Unlikely
But according to Bob Jones, ECF's event publicity officer, Stewart Reuben reckons maybe 3% of the world's available population, or 30,000,000 people, were online. See the 'Reuben formula' here:
Defining the word “hit†in relation to a website is notoriously difficult, especially in relation to this event’s website. This is partly due to the fact that people can follow some games live on-line, and every time a move is made a new hit is recorded. Stewart Reuben’s rule of thumb is that one should divide this figure by 10 to get a figure for “unique hitsâ€. So Dave Clayton’s recorded 750,000 hits yesterday on the live games section of the website for which he is responsible, could/should perhaps be toned down to something like 75,000
http://www.britishchess08.com/reports/reports.htm
My question, therefore: is there any substance to Reuben's 'rule of thumb'? And why a divisor of 10? Furthermore, the report goes on to imply that the 165,000 'hits' to the 'Britishchess08' website are 'unique'; is that likely?
There is a wider significance to all this. In Liverpool, to get money over the past three years, I've needed to compete with much more 'popular' activities. One fact I've used to impress local people is to show the huge level of internet traffic our chess events generate. In a sense, I've redefined 'spectator' for those who judge events by the volume of footfall they generate. Hence, the Tall Ships generated 500,000 visitors to the city for a day. But an EU Individual Open generates 2.5 million 'hits' a day for ten days. I simply leverage these impressive numbers into a 'pitch' for the cash. But it would be nice to know what's really going on
David
Atticus CC