Two days ago I posted my first contribution on Iroon.com and was unpleasantly surprised by the low number of visits that my article received. It was very different to my experience in Iranian.com and I was duly disappointed. That was of course until I found a fundamental different between the two sites’ reported statistics which pointed to a high level of modesty exercised by the iroon.com. Let me explain.

I used to publish my writings in Iranian.com and each article received 10,000 - 20,000 visits. I used to ponder whether these 30-40 thousand views included some repeat visits or whether indeed 50-60 thousand people had viewed the blog. As the old site did not provide any detailed statistics one could never say how many of the 100 thousands visits that my blogs received were repeat visits by eager visitors. I was however sure of one thing, that the damn Drupal would force new visitors to queue once 150 thousands people had clicked on the blog. You can now see that a person like me who is used to receiving 300 thousands to half a million visits to each of his blogs would feel a little neglected when his contribution receives 14 visits.

Now, I do not worry too much about the clicks, but to help the site reporting more respectable statistics I started hastily clicking on the link to my own blog. It is a simple process involving the link and the back button. I must have repeated that process around 100 times when I noticed that to my bewilderment it still reported 14 visits. I thought it must have been the nasty cookie or something about my profile, so logged out and tried the process again but to no avail. By then I had to go to work.

In the office I clicked on my blog again which increased the number of visits to 15. The subsequent clicks had no effect and I just frustrated myself when I tried it from two other computers in the office. Despite all my selfless efforts the number of visits still stood at 15. It was then that I realised that unlike Iranian.com, our modest iroon.com does not report the number of clicks, but the number of unique IPs.

That was the discovery that made me sigh with relief. It meant that if 5000 people worked in an office and shared the same connection, the site would report only 1 visits if all 5000 of them visited my contribution. Now if the same company had another 19 branches with 5000 people working in each, the site would only display 20 visits instead of 100,000. Even based on such modest assumption, my blog has been visited 360,000 times and not only 72 times. Given the equal number of prints that the readers distribute to their friends, the copy and pasted material in emails, and those zealous viewers who read it over the shoulder of their colleagues, I am very pleased that still more than a million people care to read my humble writings.