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At 10:02 AM 11/7/96, Glen Bleske wrote:
>My questions are who made these 50 million hits at CNN? And what were their
>motivations? 
>
>A little more than 100 million people voted. Clearly, many of the hits must be
>from non-voters.
>
>As for motivations: my point relates to how we interpret some number such as
>50 million.  On its face it is numbing, considering the number of people who
>have access to the internet after 9 p.m. at night.

Number of 'hits' do not equal, or even necessarily correlate to, number of
'people'.

A friend of mine in the New Media department of a men's magazine based in
Chicago once related her story of how her pajama-clad chairman was upset
because his major competitor was touting more 'hits' to its website than
were being made to his website.

She had to explain to him why 'hits' were meaningless. Both companies
websites featured webpages notably containing GIF files. However, a page on
his competitor's website would contained 13 thumbnail-sized GIF files, while
the equivalent webpage on his own site contained only one large (some would
even say centerfold-sized) GIF. Each of those 13 thumbnail GIFs on his
competitor's webpage was a downloadable and recordable 'hit' for that
company's server. Hence, his competitor could claim 13 times the number of
'hits' whenever anyone looked at that page compared to a 'hit' on his
equivalent page.

Moral of the story: Inches, centimeters, and 'hits' in and among themselves
don't necessarily matter. It's how the measurements are put together, and
the intelligence behind them, that makes the real difference.

_________________________________________________
Vin Crosbie         Freemark Communications, Inc.
        Director of Content Development
vin@corp.freemark.com     125 CambridgePark Drive
(617) 492-6600 x211       Cambridge, MA 02140 USA
(617) 492-6622 fax        http://www.freemark.com
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