Dear gamblor77,

Thank you for your message and for submitting your honest thoughts. We really do appreciate our members feedback, especially heart felt messages such as yours.

With regards to hit counters per individual posts on our 2000+ message boards, these would be dependent on what we, as a content provider wish to communicate through these stats.

We have been building the AGORACOM Shareholder Communities on the standard of meritocracy.

It is true that we have mapped our site using Google Analytics, as a tool to help us understand how visitors behave when they visit our community. However, much like placing a screwdriver on the hood of a car won't fix it's carburator, neither will a message view counter be conductive to the trends and sentiments of a group.

To accomplish this, we had to create a different business model that did not depend on advertising and, therefore, did not sacrifice quality of information for quantity of information. Hence we have given investors the tools necessary to determine the information each group considers to be most valuable to the group. In turn, these applications help this information become more salient; while the remainder of contributions take a supplementary role.

A simple view counter has a lot of drawbacks as a stand alone system. Consider this; f I look at a page today, then come back again 4 days later do you really only want my visit to count once? or twice? What you really want to avoid is someone hitting a page, and then endlessly reloading it.

Hence we created a model that displays user behavior and trends for the benefit of the community. We trust this model serves us and the community well, as over the past 30 months, our Community has grown exproportionally.

If a picture is worth a thousand words, this snapshot from our Google analytics is worth several million.

[PLEASE CLICK ON IMAGE FOR LARGE, CLEAR GRAPH]

Thanks again for your message and for your honest feedback.

Kind Regards,

AGORACOM