One of the first things I did when I finally got internet connection (back in 1999) was to build my own homepage. I had learned basics of html and what was needed to do so. Unlike today, homepages at that time were largely static and not a lot of interaction was going on. Nevertheless many people had an interest in how and if their content was perceived. So quite soon, everyone had some sort of page-view counter on their page. It was included in the pages using cheezy images of numbers that sort of gave you an idea how many people had actually looked at what you wrote down that sunday afternoon. People were excited about this. The other big thing were guestbooks, do you remember these? It was sort of the outsourced comment function on blogs and websites nowadays. I wasn't any different. I quickly learned to write CGI scripts (using perl) to take count of how many people actually looked at my pages. I used to care a lot about page views and how many people actually look at my content. Often if you upload content on a photo or video plattform this is the only statistic you get. If you use certail url shorteners they also allow you to see this statistic. So people get hung up on this simple measure of success. With facebook coming along it also seems to be how often stuff was "liked" on facebook or whatever other plattform.

When I started this blog and webpages for our Initiative against the EU Directive on data retention I didn't want to store any logs. Basically to ensure the users privacy. It's easier for me if I don't know who visited my website. And since I don't technically need this information, I am not even allowed to record it. Not having good ways of counting how many people actually look at my pages or read my stuff made me a little jittery. Of course you want to get some feedback on how your work is perceived.

Soon I noticed something much more valuable than page views: Engagement. Often when I met people, someone would suddenly say: "Hey, I like what you are doing". When we kicked off the Initiative agains Data-Retention I didn't worry anymore about who reads the website how often. The one thing I started caring about is: Who signs the petition. The response was incredible, we collected and still collect around 500 signatures a week. This is what actually matters. It doesn't matter how many people look at your blog, picture or video. Ditch google analytics, facebook likes etc. What matters is which action results what you do, not how many people look at it.