I received an email the other day, inviting me to use the “Industry Leading Website Counter.”
What?
I hadn’t thought about a website hit counter in a very long time.
Google Analytics, social media analytics and Church Analytics, but not a hit counter!
Have website hit counters become antiquated?
The “Industry Leading Website Counter” was COUNTERfox Beta. I would think after all these years of hit counters, they would have made it out of beta by now.
Here are the features:
- Choose from dozens of unique Hit Counter designs.
- Get your 100% FREE Web Counter Service.
- Monitor your traffic within minutes.
Here’s what one user had to say:
Counterfox not only makes my site look professional, it saves me a huge amount of time. A great service for Designers who don’t like to code. They provide clean code and.. its free!
Designers who don’t like to code?
It’s a hit counter!
But, wait, there’s a Pro version:
CounterFox PRO is the professional web counter for tracking your website visitors in a simple and effective manner. There’s no contract with our monthly plans-you can cancel the account or move to a pay-as-you-go plan at anytime.
Google Analytics = Free.
However, Church Analytics is a paid service, and offers more than Google’s free service.
But, wait again, there’s an Enterprise version, too:
CounterFox ENTERPRISE is the all-in-one tool that offers a complete tracking system to measure your web traffic and assess your site performance and ROI.
This is when I realized that the free website hit counter was a catalyst to COUNTERfox’s more robust paid services.
Here’s who’s using COUNTERfox:
So, COUNTERfox is more about providing a paid-for analytics system than it is about providing free website hit counters, but I’m still curious:
Are website hit counters antiquated?
[via COUNTERfox | Image via Pink Sherbet Photography]
Eric J says
Yes they are antiquated!
Eric Dye says
🙂
So, I guess you won’t be getting your free counter?
Chris Huff says
They’ve been replaced by the twitter+subscriber count, which can also sometimes seem like an arbitrary “hey, look how popular I am” statistic.
Eric Dye says
Good point. That’s an interesting parallel, for sure.
You get 10pts.
(Whatever that means. :-))
Allan White says
Zero value. Users don’t care.
Eric Dye says
Do you think the RSS+Twitter number matters?
David says
Mark of the beast.
Well. Sign of immaturity of the site owner.
I don’t see the counter on Campfire. That’s a relief.
Eric Dye says
LOL!
Ya, the Campfire thing is weird.
Joanna says
Hit counters are completely meaningless because you could so easily manipulate the figures if you wanted to.To me they often seem like a sign of insecurity or arrogance, like you are trying to convince people that your site is important because lots of people visit it. Some of the hit counters also really remind of the geocities days which is not the vibe a designer should be going for.
Eric Dye says
Geocities – Ha!