Unique Visitors = 1/10th of Unique IPs? 261
Max Fomitchev submitted a little blog entry where he proposes that the ratio of unique IPs to actual unique users is 10:1. This flies in the face of the numbers you usually see attached to these sorts of things. I'm not sure about the logic he uses to come up with these numbers either.
10 was arbitrary (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:10 was arbitrary (Score:2)
Re:10 was arbitrary (Score:3, Informative)
This sways the number in the opposite direction. The number the story's based on is completely baked. You could attempt to statisticly estimate the number of unique users/ip on your site with some effort, but you can't get a real concensus between one sight and the next. The reason is demographics. If you take a mobile enabled sight, you're almost always guaranteed to get at least 2 IP's per user(one mobile usabili
Re:10 was arbitrary (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:10 was arbitrary (Score:3, Interesting)
My bet would be in the grand internetscape, this number of users is actually quite small and that most do not reject or remove cookies (at least not often).
However, the point was a better gauge, not a perfect one. Requiring login would resolve most issues of users from different locations or even multiple users on the same computer, but few people are
Re:10 was arbitrary (Score:2, Informative)
Proxy servers add some issues too. I'm pro-proxy as it does reduce load on servers, speed up the user's experience, etc.
Re:10 was arbitrary (Score:4, Informative)
It totally eliminates public caching (e.g. ISP caches). A waste of bandwidth, a waste of CPU, and slower speeds (it can be a lot faster for users to get stuff from an intermediate cache than from the origin server).
Also, this isn't an option for anybody using name-based virtual hosting, which is incredibly common. There have been specifications published for getting around this, but browser support isn't there yet.
I thought it was the opposite. (Score:5, Insightful)
There are entire domains hidden behind a NAT device of some sort. This would be many users per IP address. TFA didn't mention this at all.
So I think TFA is indeed arbitrary, and also wrong.
Re:I thought it was the opposite. (Score:2)
If they offer it, ISPs charge extra for static IPs. Nobody would pay extra if it wasn't an issue.
Re:I thought it was the opposite. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I thought it was the opposite. (Score:2)
Re:I thought it was the opposite. (Score:2)
But I don't use it like that. I have a NAT router attached to the DSL modem. The router maintains my connection 24/7. The keep-alive is set as long as is allowed - 6.999999 days or something like that. And, when it renews, I'm down for less than a second.
Thus I've maintained the same IP for as long as I have checked. Of cou
Re:I thought it was the opposite. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:I thought it was the opposite. (Score:5, Insightful)
And yes, he seems to have no idea how DHCP really works. Even if your lease is expired you will get the same IP address unless the pool has been exausted and your address re-used. I see that as an extremly unlikely thing to happen because it would mean, as you say, that your pool is smaller than your installed base. If you pool is smaller then you will start having issues because x number of customers will always be without a connection because they can't get an address.
Had he mentioned Dialup users then I would be more inclined to agree because you are very likely to get a different address every time you connect.
Re:I thought it was the opposite. (Score:2)
Implant an RFID in your palm and have the mouse be the reader.
Re:I thought it was the opposite. (Score:2)
Re:I thought it was the opposite. (Score:3, Informative)
a. Prevent subscribers from running servers without paying for a static IP. While dynamic DNS services can be a workaround much of the time, it doesn't work very well with SMTP or other cases where DNS caching can cause issues.
(or, if you ask the provider)
b. To decrease the likihood of crackers breaking in your computer.
Re:I thought it was the opposite. (Score:2, Offtopic)
So now we have phishing signatures? It seems like this signature make it looks lika other user have requested a mod up on him, I would mod it down if I had the points, just for the use of low tatics, even though I do think the comment content is okay.
Re:I thought it was the opposite. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:I thought it was the opposite. (Score:2)
Well I didn't see the point of this kind of joke, and quite clearly it could fool someone, and having a good feedback in a fake response could aid him to get some extra karma. I don't think this is fair play or funny, but I don't care much to karma either, but many people here do care, and I was stunned to see this kind of "phishin
Re:I thought it was the opposite. (Score:3)
Re:I thought it was the opposite. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I thought it was the opposite. (Score:2)
I'm not sure about TFA's logic overall, but he had a point when it comes to most contemporary DSL.
I've ALWAYS had the same IP (going on 15 years)! (Score:4, Funny)
Re:On the contrary... (Score:5, Informative)
Lots of info about that is here.. including the proxy IP list, etc... http://webmaster.info.aol.com/proxyinfo.html [aol.com] they say specfically "When a member requests multiple documents for multiple URLs, each request may come from a different proxy server. Since one proxy server can have multiple members going to one site, webmasters should not make assumptions about the relationship between members and proxy servers when designing their web site."
Re:10 was arbitrary (Score:2)
Re:10 was arbitrary (Score:3, Insightful)
Crazy article (Score:3, Informative)
DSL customers do not get a new IP every time they turn on their computer. Maybe some do, but my IP changes maybe once every few months, max.
He fails to mention the effect of NAT'ing and mega proxies, both of which are in heavy use and have the OPPOSITE effect. All of AOL emerges through a small number of IP addresses, clearly more eyeballs than IPs.
I agree that IP != eyeball, but that's it, there could be more eyeballs tha
I respectfully disagree (Score:2)
Therefore, if site A has 10 million IPs logged yesterday and site B has 5 million IPs logged yesterday, it's fair to say that site A has double the traffic of sit
so... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:so... (Score:2)
Re:so... (Score:2)
Neighbor's Wireless (Score:5, Funny)
Maybe not... (Score:2, Insightful)
Am I my clothes or my reward card? (Score:2)
However, I can attest that my ADSL connection is pretty DHCP heavy. Sometimes my IP won't change for weeks, but I've had 5 or 6 IPs in 24 hours on several occasions.
Use cookies (Score:2)
Cookies are a much better indicator of what browser you are communicating with.
Also, most spiders don't bother with cookies, so that's another way to tell something isn't a real user.
Unfortunately, some users disable cookies. And then all you can do is fall back on their IP address.
It would be nice to see cookie-tracking support in Open Source stats engines like awstats.
Bruce
Re:Use cookies (Score:2)
Look for %u in defining a custom log format for analog, which can be used with the user report capability to give you session ID information (easily paired with Apache's mod_usertrack http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/mod/mod_usertrack
http://www.serverwatch.com/tutorials/article.php/3 504311 [serverwatch.com] is a good read on the module as well.
You have to get your log formats set right, but I believe this is what you're looking for (I don't use awstats, but it's most likely possi
Re:Use cookies (Score:2)
Oh, and I have another Firefox+Konqueror at work, which I sometimes browse through via X-forwarding or nx (or physically being there, obviously)... so
Re:Use cookies (Score:3, Insightful)
Of course we block cookies. Because most of the cookies you get offered are 3rd party to the site you're visiting and just crap so gator and all of that other junk could keep track of you. I only accept cookies coming from the site I'm visiting, and then only if I say YES. It took a very long time to teach a lot of people they needed to be more cautious with cookies, because there were a lot of privacy iss
But... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:But... (Score:2)
The problem is that x/0 is undefined.
Maybe (Score:2)
Nonsense (Score:2)
Besides that, think of all the people at work on internal LANs, each presenting the same public IP source address to the same web server. This effect more than makes up for the dynamic IP nonsense t
WTF? (Score:4, Insightful)
And if my IP has changed but I'm still here... that's because I haven't surfed for many hours at least otherwise the lease will be renewed and the address will stay the same. So it should still count for two visits. Duh.
Re:WTF? (Score:2)
Re:WTF? (Score:2)
From the point of view of ad impressions, this would imply that ads have exactly one chance of having an effect on a visitor, no matter if there's several hours, days, or weeks in between views. But that's not how ads work, you want to show it to the same pair o
Re:WTF? (Score:2)
1) He is interested in counting the number of unique visitors to a site. Not unique computers. If you visit a site from a home computer, a work computer, and a computer at some internet cafe somewhere, it will show up as three different IPs, and be counted as three different unique visitors. However, you are only one person, so, if we are concerned with counting unique visitors, it has just overcounted you by 2.
2) Also, even if you are using just one computer, there is a high likelihoo
Re:WTF? (Score:2)
My cable modem only gets disconnected if the power goes out, and if that does happen, it reconnects long before my DHCP lease expires. I've had the same IP for over a
Re:WTF? (Score:2)
fyi (Score:2)
1 office and 3 home computers.
10 seems a little excessive, timeframe probably matters to actual ratio: unique per day? month? year?
The author left out surfing from work (Score:2, Insightful)
Besides, the assumption that stated unique visitors = actual unique ip's is innacurate. Lots of companies track users with some kind of UID cookie, for more accurate stats. True, this isn't perfect either, and will reset when users wipe their cookies or it expires, but is probably closer to the real number than ip's.
Okay... and? (Score:2)
But I don't think dynamic DSL IPs are that big of a problem. What about DSL users that are connected 24/7? My DSL provider rarely kicks me off and I can hold the same IP address for weeks.
What about laptop users at wireless cafes or users who post/read from work? Surely the same IP that reads a tiny website from home is likely also the "same IP" that reads it f
Erm. (Score:2)
2) He skips a few major technical details about the IP system itself.
d) He's mulling over a random loopy theory in a personal blog post, which isn't quite news. If it were, I'd be William Randolph Hearst by now.
More than IP (Score:2)
If you are only using IP to generate your visitation metrics, then you're fooling yourself, for the reasons outlined in the blog. You can't guarantee an IP is unique to a user, any more than you can guarantee that a user is unique to an IP (think Internet cafe or library; different users, same machine with potentially the same IP)
You have to use a combination of log data to try and scope out exactly who's visiting: IP, browser type (can't count robots in your stats), membership id (if the site uses/requir
Max has just learned about DHCP (Score:2)
And why does he suggest that DSL clients have static addresses while cable users have dynamic ones?
Also, most home users (I'm allowed a presumption too) have routers instead of bridge/modems or PCI card modems, and they are kept on all the time. While the router is powered on it will keep renewing the existing IP address.
I ha
No fucking duh (Score:2)
I am a little puzzled by his assumption that DSL users get a new ip while cable users have a static one. I had a DSL account with a static ip and a cable with a changable one.
Also if you got a good ISP that doesn't drop your always on connection you won't be changing your IP all that often. Hell even my crap cable provider rarely changed my ip.
So no, for a "large" site you can't really determine unique visitor
Re:No fucking duh (Score:2)
Even if it does drop connection, if you renew your lease within the TTL, you'll get the same IP anyway, unless the server is configured otherwise.
On Comcast, my IP only changed if I brought up machines out of order. So long as my server was the only thing hooked up to the cable modem (to do firewalling and NAT) then the IP never c
wait a sec (Score:5, Interesting)
What about the other way?
Do they see the 10 people on the office NAT as one IP ?!?
That would skew it in the other direction and average things out wouldn't it? Now 10 is definately excessive.
Who cares (Score:2)
However, the important thing is, advertising rates aren't affected since they have been market-corrected for this. If an advertiser can make money, he will buy. If he can't, he won't. Whatever the true number is, it's already been factored in.
AOL uses HTTP caching (Score:3, Insightful)
I wonder if the other major ISPs do the same.
Re:AOL uses HTTP caching (Score:4, Informative)
No, most of the major ISPs just have an agreement with someone like Level3.net that handles dialin for them, and they only do caching for customers who pay for "high speed dialup" which is to say browsing through caching proxies that degrade image quality in order to reduce bandwidth consumption due to page loads.
Just count visits.. why count ip's? (Score:2)
Re:Just count visits.. why count ip's? (Score:2)
Re:Just count visits.. why count ip's? (Score:3, Funny)
Stupid, stupid, stupid... (Score:2)
Multiple IP addresses could be individual people. Check.
Cookies cannot be trusted to be persistant, since people routinely clear their caches. Check.
However,
Not all DSL customers are on dynamic ip.
Not all cable customers are on static ip.
The reverse of the above is also not true, so why even get into that?
So, what can we learn about IP address->Unique visitors from the above collection of information? ABSOLUTELY NOTHING.
However, you could come up with a
Or, to completely skew his numbers... (Score:3, Insightful)
how about the opposite problem? (Score:2)
If I send my sister a link on our home network, she could go to the site and it looks like the same visitor, etc. Everyone forgets about this too. Surely unique IPs != unique visitors, but it is somewhat close.
Caches, Proxies, NAT, etc. - weak article (Score:2)
So let me get this straight (Score:2)
Hmmm... I think I'll guess that there are only 10 unique internet users in the world excluding Comic Book Guy [tm], maybe that will get me reported on Slashdot giving me 10 hits of sweet, sweet advertisement money.
(*) Well, I've never heard of him.
More datapoints needed (Score:2)
Among college students and younger, it may very well be 10:1, or worse.
For those of us accessing from work and home. That will be 2:1 assuming the same site.
For those of us behind corporate firewalls or other traffic aggregate points. It could very well be 1:1000, or higher.
Without some other data point, unique IP address statistics are next to worthless, except in "We had xxx,xxx average daily last month and xxx,xxx + xx,xxx average daily this month.
Sounds familiar (Score:2)
What the author is pointing out is merely the obvious: when a site says they have X visitors they're making a guess. In fact, this link [reallygooddomains.com] from April 30th both e
The Problem (Score:2)
Better approach (Score:2)
So, what he's saying is... (Score:3, Funny)
bad maths here (Score:3, Informative)
Some examples:
I don't really know why it matters in any case. For advertising, clickthrough rate is more important than number of users, and they are not very closely related. Sadly, the poorer your site's navigation the higher the clickthrough rate (and the fewer pages on your site people will see each visit, as the ads take them away sooner).
Visitors not trusted in the Web Analytics Industry (Score:2, Insightful)
What about proxies? (Score:2, Insightful)
Also, as far as i've seen DSL IPs don't change that often.
What a waste of time. (Score:2)
The key is not the Ratio, it's the Revelation (Score:5, Funny)
That places him amongst a tiny minority of marketing people, even if his reasoning and ideas on methodology are just as batshit insane as the rest of his kin.
Re:The key is not the Ratio, it's the Revelation (Score:3, Insightful)
No, but really, if you browse the rest of his blog, he just comes off sounding like a dumbass. Well, more of a dumbass than he sounds like just from this nonsense about unique visitors to his web site.
Re:The key is not the Ratio, it's the Revelation (Score:3, Funny)
Appearantly not too much of a dumbass. Managed to get his blog slashdotted. He's probably buying a new car with his adsense check about now.
Dynamic? (Score:2)
My own stats say very different things. (Score:4, Insightful)
I did a quick analysis of a 250,000 line entry server log. I counted unique ip addresses, unique useragent cgi values, and then the number of unique combinations.
A useragent value looks like this: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows 98;
Although even this is hardly reliable since useragent can be faked, and useragent isn't unique enough to be a client fingerprint -- its still helpful in this context.
One can make the assumption that a given user's "useragent" value isn't going to to change much on a day to day basis, though it will not stay the same over time as vesions get updated. GENERALLY speaking, the same IP address but different USERAGENT values would indicate different people from behind the same NAT firewall, or different users assigned the same DHCP address.
Here's what I got for results -- it looked like counting only unique IP's gave you only about 85% of the unique hits.
Total Hits Looked At: 249861
Unique IPs: 10309
Unique UAs: 1578
Unique Combos: 12232
NAT? (Score:2)
Firstly, every DSL I have ever worked with is a peristent connection. (Why would anyone bother with an on-demand DSL?) It may not be a fixed IP, but it is a pretty darn sticky IP. It only changes when one endpoint of the DSL circuit is reset, and that generally doesn't happen much more often than monthly. If you're tracking unique IPs over the life of
Put a stop to inaccurate statistics! (Score:2)
Re:nothing much here (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:nothing much here (Score:3, Funny)
Re:nothing much here (Score:3, Informative)
Re:nothing much here (Score:3, Insightful)
So, what IS the typical holding interval for a DSL ip?
as for properly estimating, If there are good enough statistics to have separate numbers for both {known, relatively static IPs over a month} and {known dynamic IPs} you could find the ratio of returning static IPs and normalize the dynamic ones to m
Re:Already considered. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Already considered. (Score:2, Informative)
Your MAC address survives at most until the next router.
Re:Already considered. (Score:2, Funny)
So says the AC.
Re:Already considered. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Already considered. (Score:2)
Re:Already considered. (Score:2)
Because it impacts ad revenue? If IPs >> visitors, advertisers want to know this and lower the amount their willing to pay. If visitors >> IPs, websites want to raise their advertising rates.
Re:Already considered. (Score:2)
Somehow advertising on TV, radio, bill boards, foreheads, t-shirts, shoes, placards, shingles, phone books and jumbotrons manages to survive without putting house arrest style anklets on the entire population.
Re:Already considered. (Score:2)
How are we supposed to know what our visitors find interesting? Hmm, maybe we could take a look at what current content they favor and use those statistics to guide the creation of new content...
Re:NAT? 10 is too high! (Score:3, Interesting)
-Rick
Re:This is pointless (Score:5, Funny)
But 37.5% of all stats presented by people are made up on the fly.
Only about 2.31% of people know that by adding numbers after the decimal point the average person considers the number "more credible".
Re:The post is a bit misleading (Score:2)
I thought it was well known to everybody in the web business already that IP addresses and unique visitors do not have a strong direct correlation. If the point of the article wasn't to support in particular the 10-to-1 ratio, then I'm not sure what the point was.