Pro tip: check your old GeoCities page hit counter

I finally dug up my old GeoCities site from 1998 last weekend and the hit counter showed 47,283 visits. That number blew my mind because I thought maybe 50 people total ever saw that page with the animated fire gifs and MIDI file. It made me realize those old counters actually had some value as a rough benchmark of how much traffic even a homemade site could get back then. Has anyone else checked their old counters and been surprised?

2 comments

2 Comments

the_nathan13h ago

Wait, think about how many people online were doing the same thing though. Everyone and their mom was slapping counters on pages with neon text and guestbooks that had like 5 entries. But if that counter is real it means thousands of random strangers actually stumbled across your corner of the web and stayed long enough to load the page with all those animated gifs. That’s wild because today you’d be lucky to get that many visits on a brand new site without paying for ads or having a viral post. Makes you wonder if the whole internet was just way more discoverable back then when you could literally browse through neighborhoods of pages.

christopher_singh921d ago

47,283 visits on a GeoCities page is absolutely INSANE for something that basic.