“A cool 50 million“. Anthony Watts is very pleased with his web statistics. He wants you to think that “hits” mean something. In fact “hits” are a widely discredited, much like everything else Anthony shouts as proof against Global Warming. Hint: each time a web page loads every image, as well as many other items, counts as a hit. Anthony’s pages typically have at least 30 graphics each.

Wikipedia says that hits are “an inaccurate measure of a website’s popularity or web traffic.”

About.com says “Don’t use the term hits unless you want people to know you don’t know much about Web analytics or Web measurement.”

We touched on this a few days ago when denialist/internet genius Mike Lorrey tried to explain that feverish clicking meant the world was beating a path to Anthony’s door. Physicist Joe Romm, whom Anthony considers a deadly rival with his Climate Progress website, schools Anthony on the subject (again) better than I can, so just drop over for an enlightening chuckle. Anthony claims he’s “beating” Joe, but somehow Joe has 50 million hits in 2010 alone.

As usual when Anthony is trying to boast he likes to interrupt his character assassination and general polemics to make grand statements like “I’m really growing tired of the vociferous and voluminous name calling and people bashing, on both sides. It’s palpable.” Oh. My. God. You know what’s “palpable” Anthony? Your hypocrisy. You both encourage and participate in the ugliness.