What is 'wrong' with having counters?

[__DoN__]

I have noticed that several times in the past, contributors have put down sites that display counters.OK ... I agree that counters displaying "customers served" like some kind of hamburger store are not very useful. At times I don't even believe the numbers are factual. However, I am really starting to enjoy third party topsite counters. When you go to a site that is trying to sell advertising, you usually see some statement about how many visitors they are receiving monthly or yearly. How many are independantly verifiable ---> NONE.I think if you are serious about selling space on a site there **should** be some kind counter proving your claims.but using the display counters can be misleading too. ie. I can spam and add shameless plugs in forums and other high traffic online places, hence my traffic can significantly increase for the month or so... if i am shameless enough....I agree with madmonk. Those third party counters can still easily be manipulated so its still hard to trust.That is true ... I gotta remember the 'criminal elements' out there. Guess I am just not devious enough to think of these things. Those problems could be easily detected.The real question is ... would webmasters really want verifiable statistics?yeah, i should think so.If I were buying advertising on a site I would want to see the raw logs from the server. This will give you exact traffic information as well as where the traffic is comming from. Having a billion visitors a month is no good if they are not looking for what you are offering. Being able to see the search terms used to get to the site you are advertising on will be invaluable.Aside from the fact that, as has been said, they're easy to fake.. What good does it do?If you've got a low number, people are just going to think it's a crap site that nobody visits, so they go elsewhere. If you've got a high number, people are going to think you're just showing off, and go elsewhere.Your visitors knowing how many other people visit the site isn't important, as long as you know Quote:rtchar wrote:Quote:rtchar wrote:what does ffs mean?madmonk wrote:Like I said earlier ....Quote:rtchar wrote: