It's not because I'm preoccupied with my stats or obsessed with climbing the rankings in Paul Caron's quarterly survey of law professor blogs. (Both of those things are true, of course, they're just not the reason for this specific decision.) As James Joyner observed recently, Sitemeter has been acting up for a while now:
I’ve been using SiteMeter since the earliest days* of OTB, going back to February 4, 2003. There have been some glitches from time to time over the years but, for the most part, it’s done a good job of tracking visits in real time. It’s been down for three days now and, given that their website hasn’t been updated in years—they’re still “sponsored” by the old Truth Laid Bear site, which hasn’t been in operation in forever—I’m wondering if there’s anyone there doing maintenance anymore.
... SiteMeter has always had three advantages that kept it on my site. First, because I’ve used it since the beginning, it give me a steady state measure. Second, because it was so ubiquitous in those early days, it gives me a means of comparing performance to other blogs. Third, it lets me know who’s on my site and sending people to my site in real time. Google Analytics, by contrast, tells me who was on the site yesterday.
In addition to the problems James notes, Sitemeter has been very glitchy lately. Sometimes the counter widget shows two counters. Sometimes the widget code wipes out the entire sidebar.
Like James, I'm pretty dissatisfied with Sitemeter right now. But also like James, at least for right now, I've used Sitemeter since the biog started and the three advantages he cites apply to my site as well. (it's sort of a path dependency story, kind of.) But I'm going to experiment with Statcounter and maybe Google Analytics to see if I can get more stable and accurate stats, because if Sitemeter keeps resting on its laurels, there may come a time when those advantages no longer justify using it. (After all, sometimes following a path gets so costly not even strong path dependency can justify continuing to follow it.)
