Statistics, damned statistics

Statcounter.

Has anyone used the free version?

I have, for as long as I've been running my blog. But lately it seems to have gone haywire. Some days the figures jogs along  and then there will be a sudden spike.  Someone in Mountain Ash, California, visits and gives me 856 page views. I don't know if I believe in this person or not, but what else can it be? A glitch in the technology? A search bot gone AWOL?

Yet last week I found another location that had racked up 500 odd views in one day, this time from a place midway between Bern and Lucerne in Switzerland. I looked it up on Google Earth and there seems to be nothing there but endless forest. I look at Clustrmap and the stats are entirely different to those on Blogger. Google analytics is different again. It is difficult to know if any of them are to be believed.

Stats are not really so important that I want to pay for installing Statcounter or one of the other systems, and I do wonder if what used to be free is now fast becoming an income stream for someone.