Hi All,  Jody brings out a good point about finding out how many
hits are coming from MMD members or non-members (reference article
in MMDigest 971007).

I have tried to make the same distinction at my site without any real
luck.  My 'stats' report is pretty inclusive and lists numerous aspects
of site hits.  My counter on the Main Index Page was installed on April
1st of this year and just went over 5600 hits today (I think the MMD
counter has been in place since sometime in 1995).

I have studied the stats report and am a bit surprised that the majority
of hits are NOT coming from what I would call 'average users' in the
United States (there's that word 'average' again).  The majority come
from US Commercial (42%), which I think are Search Indexes and companies
trying to get me to advertise through them.  The next category is
'Unresolved' (22.3%).  I'm not sure exactly what that means.

The third category is 'Network' (20.8%) followed by US Educational (4.3%)
and then 'Canada' (1.7%), Non-Profit Organization (1.3%), US Government
(1.1%) and finally United States (1.1%).  So only about 575 visitors,
over the past 6 months, have been 'private' individuals (not affiliated
with any particular organization).

However, unlike the MMD, I have over 50 different pages (all of which are
advertised with various search indexes) and the total number of hits in
the month of September exceeded 27,000.  What that boils down to is an
average of 297 visitors from the US not affiliated with any particular
organization during the month of September.  (Confused Yet???)

Breaking that down into MMD members and non-members is virtually im-
possible unless each member sends an e-mail letter which can be counted
at a later date.  Here at PlayerCare, I receive about 10-15 letters a
day.  The vast majority (over 50%) are questions about player pianos.
About 25% are for the free QRS catalog and the remaining 25% are related
to Search Indexes, For Sale and Want Ads, Off-the-Wall questions about
the site and QRS Roll Orders.

In closing, while I certainly appreciate Jody's question (I have the same
curiosity with regards to my site), it has become painfully obvious to
me that it is almost (if not totally) impossible to differentiate between
site visits from MMD members and non-members.

By the way, Jody, if you find out how to tell the difference, I'd be very
interested.

Musically,
John A. Tuttle (johntuttle@playercare,com)