GayFLL Magazine uses "page-views" to most accurately represent how active our web site is, because of the way it serves content, and allows 3rd parties to use the content on our servers for their own web sites. This section will help explain how we keep track of viewership, using "page-views" as opposed to "visitors", "hits", etc.

First, some definitions:

Visitor: When a person actually comes to the web site, they are counted as a visitor. They are re-counted as another visitor every 30 minutes. There is NO accurate way to get actual numbers of how many people visit a web site, and this number is always an "estimate". Factors that make this inaccurate include robots, (unmanned computers scanning content for various reasons,) dynamic IP Addresses, (Services like AOL change a user's IP address almost every click,) and hot-linked content. (Content hosted on our server, but displayed on someone else's web site are not counted, or unfairly counted.) There are also ways in which visitor numbers can be increased unfairly, such as images hot-linked into email newsletters and instant messages. (A visitor doesn't actually visit the web site, but loads an image hosted on the web site's server, and counts the viewer as a visitor.)

Page-view: On our server, when a full page of our content is displayed, or if one of our videos is played from a 3rd party web site, it counts as a page-view. Content scanned by robots (unmanned computers) are NOT counted!

Hits: When an element of a page is downloaded into a browser, it is a hit. So, if a single page has 3 images on it, it counts as 4 hits. (one for each image, plus the page itself!) This term is almost ALWAYS inaccurately used, and really has no relevance to determining how active a web site is.

GayFLL Magazine uses the page view numbers to determine it's activity as accurately as possible. We make honest efforts to make sure this number is as accurate as possible, and avoid trying to "pad" our numbers with unfair practices such as the "email image hotlink" trick explained above. Because our system ignores "robots" for this number, it would take us enormous amounts of time to pad this number manually.

We also make an effort to ignore, and disassociate ourselves, from the unfair practice of popular Internet "ratings" systems, which most people take as "quality/popularity", when in fact, the only thing these rating systems determine is how many people link to them. These systems can be cheated as well, and the "relevance" factor developed by these systems is quite inaccurate for websites that don't have tens of millions of viewers. (As we're sure you've gone to a search engine, looked for something, and have gotten results totally inaccurate!) As part of our web site is a directory in a database format, and because of our policy of allowing advertisers to hotlink our content, search engines tend to see our web site as "repeat information", and "not important", even though we conveniently put everything in one place, and specifically have a very targeted audience.

We hope that this clarified some questions for you. If you have any other questions about our policy, you can contact Dennis.