What Does This Mean?
A running tally of page visits displayed on a web page, often drawn as odometer-style digits, that served both as a statistic and as a badge of popularity.
REAL-WORLD EXAMPLE
"The page ended with a hit counter that read 000417 visitors."
LORE & ORIGIN
Visible hit counters were popular in the 1990s. Free hosts such as GeoCities and script archives such as Matt's Script Archive (a text counter released in 1996) made them easy to install, and one history of the period describes a counter as being as typical of a personal site between about 1995 and 2002 as a guestbook. A high number signalled popularity, and some owners started the count at a large value. Counters were later replaced by server log analysis and by script-based services such as Google Analytics that do not show a number to visitors, and some counter providers were used to plant hidden links for search ranking. A visible counter is now mostly a deliberate retro touch.
MENTIONS OVER TIME
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RELATED SEARCHES
TOP PLATFORMS
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