whoa

[ksmith]

So I'm checking other authors' websites, and stopped by George RR Martin's. Gee, he's had almost 9.5 million visitors since the end of 2000.

yeah...

Comments

[mt-yvr.livejournal.com]

Hey hey hey... remember that you need to ask a vital question in counters : what's it counting?

If it counts each time the page is opened, the number can get HUGE. If it counts a VISIT by a discrete IP address, then yeah... the number is scary.

But 65,000 isn't something to sneeze at.

[kristine-smith.livejournal.com]

I forgot how Ruta says those homepage visits are counted.

I tend to go by the inner page counters because it's a nice way to punish myself. How many checked out the CODE page? Read the 1st chapter? Moved on to RULES? How many folks read the 1st chapter of J5? How many read Chapter 8?

What amuses me is how many visits the Dog page has had--over 12,000. I need to update the puppy pics--those boys get more hits than the books!

[mt-yvr.livejournal.com]

I know. I never have quite figured out why it is.. but pet pages get waaay more hits. I once looked at the hits for Kristen Britain's pets... it was wild, almost 2 to 1 I believe. It's levelled out on hers, though. Admittedly I've not looked in a while.

And she decided (we did I think, I forget who made that decision) to forgo the inner counters.

:P

[msagara.livejournal.com]

It's not unreasonable to assume that people who visit the site have read the books (if they hadn't, they probably wouldn't visit), but they're curious about the person behind them -- and pets are part of that inner life they don't get to see otherwise.

As for the counters on GRRM's outer page, the store is probably worth several hundred of those hits -- it was our way of checking the work-in-progress as the "when is the next book coming out?" questions piled up.

[janni.livejournal.com]

Hey, maybe he just has one really obsessed fan who's spend the past 6 years loading and reloading the page. :-)

[leahbobet.livejournal.com]

--and they were all there to ask when A Feast For Crows was coming out. *g*

[kristine-smith.livejournal.com]

Boy, that man is getting no mercy.

[leahbobet.livejournal.com]

We put a sign out once on the counter at the bookstore that said "We don't know when the next GRRM is coming out". People asked that much.

I think his fans hated him with the kind of need-hate usually reserved for crack dealers. *g*

[kristine-smith.livejournal.com]

heh..."I'm waiting for my man...twenty-seven dollars in my hand...he's never early, no, he's always late...first thing you learn is that you always got to wait...I'm waiting for my man..."

Lou knew.

[thecurlyboy.livejournal.com]

*yawn* I dislike Page Counters with lots of hits. How does the number of people who frequent a place have anything to do with the quality of what's inside?

It reminds me of McDonalds "1.9 billion served" signs in the past. Sure, that's a lot of people served, but ... it's McDonalds. Unless I'm dying of starvation, I'm not eating there; the food is just plain nasty.

There's two interpretations of page counters with millions of hits that I can see. Either (a) it's someone who needs his or her ego stroked, in which case I certainly don't want to further inflate the ego, or (b) it's someone who set up a site and forgot about it, never to come and reset the hits to have some real value, in which case the site won't have any real current, useful information. Either way, it's not something I like seeing, and I usually avoid those sites that do it.

[kristine-smith.livejournal.com]

Ego boo has its uses. For months at a time, it may be the only feedback you get.

There's a notice on Martin's website that is was updated a few days ago, so someone is keeping up with it. As for showing the numbers, I'm torn. There's the old marketing trick where the store owner always makes sure there are cars parked in front of the place, even if they're the employees' cars. People tend to visit places that show signs of being busy, and avoid places that don't look busy. I don't know if that's still true.

I tend to look at the Last Update date, because that lets me know whether a site is being kept up. One of reasons I linked my blog through to my website is because it's an easy way to update content regularly. Otherwise, with only a few short stories and several years between books, things don't change much.