Question: What is a download counter for?
Answer: A download counter is simply a small program which consists of two lines of code. The first line of code will get embedded into your download link while the second line of code is for a counter. As a result, when someone clicks on a download link, the counter will show the other visitors to your web site how many times that particular file has been downloaded.
Question: How does this download counter work?
Answer: When placing a download counter on your website at a particular download link, you will need to add a piece of code to the link itself and at the same time you will also need to add a line of code somewhere near the link to let people know how many times the file has been downloaded. Every time the file gets downloaded, a signal is sent to our servers and as a result the number of the counter increases accordingly.
Question: What do these download counters look like?
Answer: The download counters can come in many different styles which of course you get to choose. If you have even been to a web site and seen a download link for downloading a file and it says that the file has been downloaded so many times, this is a download counter. What exactly it looks like will depend on what you choose it to look like and there are many options that are available.
Question: Why is a download counter important to use?
Answer: For starters a download counter allows those visiting your website to see how many times a file has been downloaded and as a result, many people will choose to download a particular file based on the number of times it has been downloaded; this is the file’s “popularity” metering. Furthermore it will help you to determine if someone is hot linking directly to your file rather than to the download page which allows you to prevent it from happening because it can use up a lot of bandwidth.
Summary:
The use of a download counter is important for anyone who is wanting to offer some file for download as it not only helps you as well as your website’s visitors see how many times the file has been downloaded, but it can also help you find out who is maliciously using up your website’s bandwidth.
This will give you an accurate accounting for the number of times a particular file has been downloaded as compared to many analytic programs that are currently available. Furthermore when used in combinations with statistical data if you see a file showing up as getting a lot of downloads from visitors coming from a particular web site but the counter is not showing as many this means that they are potentially hot linking directly to your file which will use up a significant amount of bandwidth.
All in all though, the use of a download counter will allow you to see how popular a particular file is. The more times a file has been downloaded, the more popular it is and as a result it will begin to be downloaded more and more just simply because it is popular.
Notes:It is important to remember that according to our Terms of Service (T.O.S.), any time you are using our embedded counter code on a particular file, you are also required to use the download counter and if you do not, your account may be automatically deleted. We use a small and specialised spider program which will visit your web site from time to time and if it finds that you are not following with our T.O.S. then it will automatically delete your account.
