The rise of top-quality stat tracking software is a great thing for webmasters. Using websites like W3Counter, Google Analytics or self-hosted methods has become almost necessary for webmasters and I would be lying if I said that I hadn’t lost a large amount of time inside one of these scripts looking at what my users have been up to. Having a tool to collect, store and analyse this data is essential for those that own the website, but not so much for those that are viewing it.

Back in the old days fan websites and pre-hosted websites would flaunt their website statistics with little recognisable buttons, allowing any visitor to their web page to come in and see what the collective audience of that website has been up to. Much like the Internet back then this idea was unprofessional and not really intended for those wishing to bring their ideas to life.

Sadly, it seems that showing off statistics has made its way back onto websites.

Lurking on an ever-growing amount of web pages stat trackers like Feedburner and StatCounter.com, allowing users to publically show what users have subscribed to their RSS feeds and what their users like and dislike on their web page. It’s almost a rarity to see a Blog that doesn’t sport a FeedBurner button now!

The obvious reason behind this is to make their website look popular and to give themselves a motivational slap on the ass for a job well done. I’m sure there are a few visitors that’ll want to check certain stats to see if a Blog is popular enough to be recognised as a good source, but in general use it’s pretty much unnecessary. It adds very little to your web page, and nothing towards the content.

I honestly cannot see why people see the need to show off how many RSS subscriptions they have, or how many people have found their website through various terms we would never dream of choosing. I was always under the impression that the best websites are the ones that fulfil the users needs, not the ones that have twelve million visitors a second (or claim they do).