Evan Williams

Remember when web site traffic was talked about in terms of "hits"? You'd read about how many millions of hits Netscape got per month and other sites bragged about getting 30,000 hits a day. Eventually, we moved away from the term "hit" because everyone realized it was pretty meaningless. You see, a hit was often counted (depending on who was counting them) not just for a page load, but for every element (e.g., graphic) included on the page, as well. One visit of this page, for example, would be worth about 40 hits (if the browser had images turned on). But a site that was less graphical and had equal usage would register half the hits. Pageviews replaced hits as the primary traffic metric - not just because they're more meaningful, but because it also determined how many... (more)