Counters ... Outster

[Dzinerbear]

Hi all,

I'm just hoping that someone can give me a brief overview of services like Outster.

I can't really tell from their website what it's all about.

I'm assuming that it's a counter and it'll track the number of visitors to your site. No biggie, you can get that from your logs, right?

So, I'm also assuming that when you put their counter on your site, they include your site in one of their listings and hopefully you'll get some traffic.

Am I on the mark? Is this worth doing? Do people actually get good traffic?

What are the pitfalls or downsides of adding these things to your site?

Thanks
dzinerbear

[Chilihost]

you are spot on, its a counter service and you get listed on their top sites so you get some clicks to your site, but really it is just another traffic leak and it adds to your galleries and sites loading times too. Is their traffic worth it??? I don't know!

But it is a good service if you are using free hosts or a webhost that does not offer stats.

cheers,
Luke

[dirtygeek]

Ya know, I've tried them on a few sites. Unless their traffic shows up as some unresolved list or something I never saw anything at all come from ouster.com. I did see my site listed there though. You can get the same things pretty much from your server log file and using a program like 123LogAnalyzer. Without having to add their code and graphics to your site.

Chilihost is right; it's good for sites on free hosting. But there are other counters that do the same thing that can give you the same info as them. PayCounter is another one that I've used that tracked where traffic came from. (Shows you the entry link where the person clicked from.)The only thing with those counter things is that unless it's on the top of your site, it may or may not track the visitor. It doesn't track them if it's not done loading when they click and leave the page.

[Dzinerbear]

Thanks guys. I appreciate the heads up. I figured as much, so I'm glad I didn't go through putting them up on my site just to have to remove them down the road. And you reminded me of the time that I put a counter on another site a few years ago, and man, did it ever slow down the page load.

Cheers
Dzinerbear

[dirtygeek]

Glad I could help ya. One thing I used to do with the counter from ouster was put it on the bottom of TGP things I did. But register the counter to link to my paysite.

That way it tracked all the traffic from them, but I didn't have to put it on my main site and mess up the load time.