TRAFFIC: Everyone’s been fighting over this statement by Eric Alterman:

The Prospect is killing on line, however, with 450,000 unique users a month at www.prospect.org. The Nation is 357,000, TNR is 275,000, and The Weekly Standard is 247,000. National Review Online claims 55,000 a day, but I don’t know what that means, month-wise.

I’m not going to get into the meat of this argument any more (several readers have expressed a preference for teen sex, or cloning, or basically anything but more discussion of the difference between pageviews, unique visits, and hits.) But by way of comparison, for the first 10 days at the new site, Extreme Tracker reports that InstaPundit had just under 183,000 unique vistors, which translates (183,000 x 3) to over 540,000 a month. That suggests to me that the figures Alterman quotes (which come from the CJR) are low. I really doubt that InstaPundit is getting more unique visitors every month than TNR and the The Weekly Standard combined. (If it is, then I should ask my boss for a raise. Oh, wait. . . dang!) I’m not blaming Alterman, but I suspect that the CJR figures are outdated, or just plain wrong.

Of course, you can click on my counter at the bottom of the page and see for yourself. I wonder why these “big media” web publications aren’t willing to do the same. What do they have to hide? It seems to me that there are two possible dynamics going on here:

(1) A general prejudice in favor of secrecy, of the sort that many of these publications impute to, say, the Bush Administration. (“If we don’t have to tell people stuff about our operations, why should we?”)

(2) A fear that if they open up their numbers, people will realize that they’re getting their asses kicked by InstaPundit, and some teen girl’s “tribute to Lance Bass” site.

Me, I’m in favor of transparency, and I’d like to see open, counters (they don’t have to be third-party counters like I use, though I suppose that adds a bit of credibility). But why not? Openness is what the web is about, and I really can’t see why this sort of information should be secret.