Velcrometer
Throwing stuff at the internet to see what sticks
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M. Giant's Velcrometer Throwing stuff at the internet to see what sticks |
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Tuesday, February 11, 2003 Frustrations of an Online Traffic Whore There is a contingent of online diarists, journalers, and bloggers who don’t care about their site traffic. They talk about how they don’t care who links to them, how people are finding them, what kind of messed-up Google searches are leading people to them, or even the raw number of page views they get. I do not number myself among that contingent, i.e., liars. Hence that Site Meter icon way down at the bottom of the page. I’ve got the free version, which is, as they say, worth every penny. That’s not really fair of me to say. Site Meter does provide me with some interesting and useful information. When it works, that is. When it doesn’t, I find that fairness becomes less of a priority to me. Here’s the thing: I wouldn’t mind if it were just that the reports were temporarily unavailable. I wouldn’t go all Veruca Salt, stamping my feet and wailing that “I want to now who’s finding me by Googling ‘Michael Jackson lawsuit’ noooowww, Dadeee! NOW!” What bugs me is that when Site Meter’s down, it’s all the way down. Meaning it’s not even recording my hits during its outages. And that’s frustrating to me, because it means that the Pulitzer selection committee is going to look at my reports and they’ll think that I had only six hits during a period where I may have had seven or even as many as eight. And that could make all the difference. These Site Meter people are costing me money and crippling my literary career! Of course, how tacky is it of me to be complaining about a free service? Pretty tacky, I admit. It’s not like I’m paying Site Meter or anything. All they get out of it is a piece of my browser window given over to a banner ad whenever I look at a report. But wait—is that banner ad still there when I go to pull up some info and I just get a message saying, “this report is unavailable”? Yes. Yes, it is. I’m holding up my end of the bargain, Site Meter. I’m ignoring that banner ad just as much as I would be if you were giving me the information you agreed to provide. It’s you who are falling down on the job. I wouldn’t even mind if the outages weren’t so frequent. Or so long. Or so long and frequent. I suffered in silence when my stats were “unavailable” for the better part of a week, a week that ended up putting a sizable dent in my January totals. Then the reports came back, and I was happy again. Then they went away some more. Then some more. Then an entire afternoon. I sent a pissy e-mail to Site Meter’s webmaster, communicating my displeasure. I explained that I had been considering getting a Site Meter Pro account (in other words, one that I’d be paying for), but if this was the kind of service I could expect, then I wouldn’t bother. Hey, whadd’ya know? I guess I’m a liar after all, because I never had any intention of doing any such thing. Later, I got a response, saying there was a problem with the server and it would be fixed in a couple of hours. No explanation for previous outages. No promises to try to minimize future outages. And certainly no apologies of any kind for outages past, future, or present. Just two lines that amounted to “siddown and shaddap.” Again, I realize I’m not paying for this or anything. It’s not like I can demand my money back. I get that. But you’d think that for a company whose entire clientele creates, owns, and maintains websites, they’d want to make customer service a bit more of a priority. You never know what kind of grouchy rant some frustrated blogger might post on his or her page one day. Some frustrated blogger who isn’t nearly as patient as I am, for example. I’m just saying. posted by M. Giant 3:36 PM 0 comments 0 Comments:
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