Showerthought: I used to think hit counters on 90s sites were pointless, then I archived one and changed my mind

Zara Moore · 2026-09-14T18:15:06.309917+00:00

Two years ago I started saving old Geocities pages with the Wayback Machine, but I skipped any that had those little odometer hit counters because I thought they were just vanity widgets. Then a guy in a Facebook group for dead web rings showed me his list of 40 counters from 1997 to 2001, and every single one still had its last count frozen in the HTML. I realized those numbers are like fossils of how many people visited before the site went quiet, sometimes only 12 hits total. Now I grab every counter I can and log the numbers in a spreadsheet with the URL. Does anyone else treat the last digit on a dead counter as a kind of timestamp?

🐿️Pinecone Attack

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Showerthought: I used to think hit counters on 90s sites were pointless, then I archived one and changed my mind | Abandoned Web Finds - Pinecone Attack