Let's never speak of 'hits' again

It's time for news organizations to remove from their style guides this misleading term for Web traffic.

Posted: 2007-05-21

I sent this out today in OJR's weekly e-mail:

I was reading a story in the LA Times this morning about pet owners using blogs to both vent and mobilize over the recent outbreak of animal deaths due to contaminated pet food: http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-petpower21may21,0,6812321.story
What bothered me about this story, along with so many others I've read in dozens of newspapers, was its use of the term "hits" to describe a website's popularity.
Please, please, please, I beg you to adopt a new policy in your newsroom's style guide -- to ban the word "hits" in reference to website traffic. Please take a look at OJR's online journalism glossary to see why "hits" is such a deceiving term. You will better serve your readers by using the term "unique visitors" instead, or better yet, "readers" in reference to the number of unique visitors a website attracts.
I'm sick of reading about websites with no more than a couple hundred readers promoting themselves as having "millions of hits" -- and reporters letting them get away with it. At the same time, I hate having to wonder about the truthfulness of a new website that really does attract millions of visitors. It's way past time to ditch this meaningless term and to use clearer, more accurate vocabulary in our news stories.

Thoughts?

Responses:

From Mac Slocum on May 22, 2007 at 7:50 AM

Amen to an anti-hits movement. Like you, I'm tired of hearing/reading/seeing sites go on and on about their traffic, but knowing full well they're probably using bad analytics and/or bad metrics. Hits are useless, server logs are inflated and untrustworthy and, unfortunately, the entire Web traffic arena is flawed.