Here’s how OhStats.com ranks news and information sites in the Duluth/Superior market that sell advertising.

Average Daily Unique Visitors – July 2010
1. Duluth News Tribune – 5,700
2. Northland’s NewsCenter – 1,500
3. Perfect Duluth Day – 1,500
4. Eyewitness News – 1,400
5. Fox 21 News – 900
6. Superior Telegram – 900
7. Cloquet Pine Journal – 800
8. Business North – 700
9. Twin Ports Nightlife – 600
10. Northland Sports Online – 500
(Less than 500 daily unique visitors: UMD Statesman, Howie Blog, Duluth Dish, Lake County News Chronicle, Duluth-Superior Magazine, Duluth.com, The DuSu, The Transistor, The Woman Today, The Duluth Scene, Oeuvre Magazine)

Average Daily Page Views – July 2010
1. Duluth News Tribune – 20,100
2. Northland’s NewsCenter – 2,900
3. Northland Sports Online – 2,700
4. Eyewitness News – 2,600
5. Cloquet Pine Journal – 2,400
6. Perfect Duluth Day – 2,300
7. Superior Telegram – 2,000
8. Twin Ports Nightlife – 1,300
9. Fox 21 News – 1,100
(Less than 1,000 daily page views: UMD Statesman, Business North, Howie Blog, Duluth Dish, Lake County News Chronicle, Duluth-Superior Magazine, Duluth.com, The DuSu, The Transistor, The Woman Today, The Duluth Scene, Oeuvre Magazine)

One way companies distort their Web stats is by quoting numbers from log-based statistics systems like Webalizer and AwStats. These programs provide grossly inaccurate numbers — sometimes inflating the amount of page views by 1,000 percent.

Those log file systems do count people, but they also count software applications that run automated tasks over the Internet, such as Googlebots (the good robots which index information for search engine purposes) and spambots (the bad robots that harvest e-mail addresses for nefarious purposes).

Other tracking methods, such as Google Analytics, separate that information out, providing useful stats for measuring the traffic of actual human beings on a Web site. And OhStats, which allows anyone to check the traffic of any site, produces estimates that are similar in accuracy to Google Analytics.

This is important, because no one wants to be duped by Webalizer stats and end up paying for an ad to be seen by millions of Web robots.

Of course, raw traffic isn’t the best way to decide which sites to advertise on. Comparing the cost of an ad per impression is a better measure of bang for the buck, but doing so can be complex because some ads are positioned differently than others (so not all impressions are equal) and some companies sell without guaranteeing a specific number of impressions.

Also, the demographic and psychographic profiles of the people who visit a specific site should be carefully matched with the product or service being marketed.

Sorting all of that out can be a bit of a chore, but comparing the raw traffic of Web sites is fairly easy. Just visit OhStats.com and enter the URLs in question.