Why do websites publicly show their traffuc (pageviews)?

707 views

Is this just to flex? To show their domain authority?

Thanks all for your explanations!

In: Other

3 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

You are walking down the road in search of a food place because you are hungry.

You noticed two restaurants, but you’re not sure which to go to. You observe that one of the restaurants has people inside and the other does not.

Which one do you go to?

You don’t know, but you end up going into the restaurant that has people inside.

What you just experienced is called: [social proof.](https://sproutsocial.com/insights/social-proof/)

Social proof is when you are more likely to pick the choice that other people have picked in the past. This might be due to the idea that if more people have chosen that choice it’s the safer option: which is very true in a lot of cases.

This is why websites will publicly show their page-views. If you are on a website which has 1 million views per week, you are far more likely to trust the website and far more likely to purchase something than if you were on a website that had less or no views.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Do you have a current example? I haven’t seen a page counter in over a decade.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Have any sites other than some old person’s knitting blog done that since 2002? Back then, it was an ego thing and way to track visitors in the days before tools like Google Analytics