We always report the previous month's estimated traffic as the first story in our News section every month.

To avoid any confusion about the term "hits" (which are simply individual entries in a web log) and real human beings (the only criteria we measure), we also specify total page views and our gross bandwidth consumption figure as well.

 
Upgraded Measurements

Because of this, we had to estimate the number of visitors to our site right up to the end of August 1998 by measuring front page counters.

Using the counter method (which underestimates real traffic, since many people enter our site by going directly to pages that interest them), we believe that we were visited by at least 1,037,815 people between April 1996 and August 1998.

In September 1998, however, we moved to a host in Toronto, Canada who did use a fully-featured statistics package - and when we finally relocated to our own hosting company eservers in August 1999 we purchased the software and took it with us. As a result, we've been publishing more detailed summaries of our monthly traffic here ever since.

 
A Word About Privacy

The short answer is that no matter how sophisticated the technique used, there is very little of a truly personal nature that can ever be determined about any visitor beyond the browser they use and their dial-in IP address, time of day and country of origin.

Australian Cybermalls has a privacy policy where we outline how we handle this matter. But the nub of it is that we respect the privacy of everyone who visits us, and this is reflected in the data we present publicly. You can view our monthly traffic statistics from September 1998 onwards below:

 
Monthly Site Traffic Summary