What is a Stats Junkie, Anyways?

Do you spend hours analyzing various statistical data? Do you have an addiction for statistics and numbers? Well then, you belong to that class of people called statistical junkies or “stats junkies”. By definition, junkies are people who are addicted to or have an extreme passion for a certain thing. And those people, who have statistics as the subject of this addiction, are fondly called the stats junkies.

Stats junkies are defined by their passion for data and organize that in to meaningful statistics. With the advent of the Internet era, the term ‘stats junkies’ has got a whole new dimension in its meaning. In the Internet parlance, this term is used to define those people who diligently keep track of the statistics of the surfing habits of people – otherwise known as any sensible internet marketers! For example, there are people who keep track of the number of visitors to a particular website or a web page. Then there are those who require the data regarding number of people who post in certain forums of their interest or the number of people who create threads in forums.

The most common ‘symptoms‘ of being a stats junkie is the frequency with which you check the statistics page on your blog, or on sites like Google’s adsense and other RSS tracking sites. The main factor that leads one to become a stats junkie is programs like pay-per-click advertisements and adsense websites. These are basically programs that let you earn money based on the popularity of your website’s contents. A popular program that lets you do this is the Google Adsense. Using this service offered by Google, website owners or administrators get to place advertisements on their website. Google administers these advertisements and when users click on the advertisements, Google pays them a certain amount. Obviously, the number of users visiting your page will be directly proportional to the popularity of your website or blog. Thus you will be tempted to keep track of the statistics of your blog or website which will eventually land you as a stats junkie.

These activities will help you make money with relative ease and minimal effort. Thus it is also a very lucrative business. There are various kinds of statistics depending on the type of activity. For example, there are statistics for feeds, search, mobile content, domains etc.

If you are a staunch stats junkie, there are some tools that you can make use of to really track your statistics. A classical example is the Adsense notifier for FireFox. These tools help you track your statistics at a glance, thereby obviating the need to login to view the same. The Google desktop sidebar widget is another tool that provides such information on your Google desktop.

Hard core stats junkies use a variety of methods at varying frequencies to keep themselves up-to-date with their stats. There are people who check their earnings once every 15 minutes or so and those who check them once everyday or once in a week. Some prefer to update themselves through mobile phones as well. So as a stats junkie, which one would you opt for? If you want to make money on the internet, you’d do well to be a stats junkie!