But more specific statistics are much harder to come by. There is no way of knowing the average number of times your readers returned to that TV section of your newspaper throughout a night's viewing. And other media such as TV and radio stations rely on increasingly sophisticated sampling techniques to calculate the overall figures of how many people tuned in to a particular channel or a specific programme. It's usually over-general, periodic, spasmodic even, partial and expensive. But for truly digital publishers the terrain is totally different.
Websites have plenty of raw data about their visitors which costs almost nothing to collect.
Though the logs are a potential treasurehouse of information, historically they have mostly been used by system administrators for a quick overview of bandwidth problems. The logs would show peak traffic times, which pages are most popular or rarely visited, how the data is flowing back and forth between your webserver and your users. Many webmasters ignore their logs completely. Or they take only occasional, cursory glances at them. Others are beginning to move away from the crude macro-level of analysis.