OK, I Guess It's A Competition After All.

Yes, this is about the Cape Cod Times Classified Ads section that printed in HUGE lettering, the words: BE SEEN! But let's not get hasty here. While it's certainly true that I've used this very phrase for years (along with others like "It's that easy!"), I'm not the one who coined these phrases so there are no copyright violations taking place. You can't copyright catch phrases or words like "online" - so all this really means is that there is obviously a competition and this is just one of those "friendly fire" events that often occur in the process.

Am I worried about it? Not really. For starters, they've already commited a fatal flaw in boasting 8500 page views per day - at a time when click fraud is finally being exposed for what it is! Now, I'm not saying that the Cape Cod Times is involved in a click fraud campaign, but I have, since 1990 explained that websites who do boast rediculous amounts of daily page views are not publishing the results of all that traffic. In fact, one of my competitors at that time didn't even bother to mention that the majority of their excessive traffic was caused by people logging in and out of their free email account service with the website in question! Then, of course, there is the question of how the IP action is tracked. I remove my IP action and only record "unique signatures" so I can be sure of where I'm sitting in terms of genuine traffic. Where an IP signature repeats frequently, I simply count the number of times they access the site - but I DON'T count their multiple IP sig entries as different page views. Yes, I'm really fussy like that. I use trackers for what they're intended to be. They help me to identify weak pages from stong ones so I can know which pages need more work than others. I also geo-track to determine where my target audience is coming from. But in the end, the bottom line is determined by what percentage of service comes from that number of page views. That is the information I'm after. Words to the wise...

It ain't what you got... it's how you use it!