"Is there any way to determine the popularity, i.e., unique hits, for any
given website over any given period of time?" -- John Randolph
Unique hits aren't easily obtainable except from private traffic logs. But
comScore MediaMetrix
(www.comscore.com) and Nielsen//NetRatings
(www.nielsen-netratings.com/) publish regular data on the top sites for their
clients.
Poor-man's traffic measurement is a bit cruder, but quite useful. Both Alexa
(www.alexa.com) and Google
(toolbar.google.com) offer toolbars that track members' web surfing habits and
compile traffic rankings based on this data. The toolbars give you some indication
of the amount of traffic to the website your browser is seeing. Alexa offers
an average traffic rank (with Yahoo.com as #1), Google a relative page rank
(with Yahoo.com as 10 of 10), though occasionally these can vary widely (see
SiteSell below). Both also provide some indication of the number of hyperlinks
pointing to the site. These don't seem to be terribly accurate but provide a
relative measure. To give you some points of comparison I have appended monthly
page view data for my own sites from recent traffic logs.
Alexa gives you the siteowner, address, phone number, and the date the domain
was first put into use. You can also read Alexa user ratings and reviews and
browse related links. Google Page Info includes a cached snapshot of the webpage,
similar pages, and a translation into your selected language, such as to English
from French, German, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese.
I normally don't like to encumber my web browser with extras, but I use my
Google toolbar several times per day. This kind of traffic and linking data
can help you conduct a competitive analysis and make sense of search engine
rankings that are strongly influenced by link popularity.
