How Outprint counts

What each figure means

• Reader: one browser on one Tbilisi day. The reader is stored as a hash of address and browser with that day's random salt, and the salt is deleted two days later, so no reader can be followed from one day to the next.
• Page view: one opening of a public page, reported by the page itself.
• Article view: one reading of an article page.
• Followed click: one journey out through the paid link, reported twice — by the page and by the browser's own ping — and counted once.
• Unique readers: distinct readers of an article in a Tbilisi day, printed beside the totals, never instead of them.
• Reading now: readers whose page has said it is still open in the last minute. An open page says so every 30 seconds while it is visible.

What is recorded but not counted

Nothing is thrown away silently. Everything below is recorded with its reason and shown as a count next to the counted figures.

• Pages and articles: a repeat within 30 seconds of the last counted view is not counted again.
• Paid links: a repeat click within 10 minutes of the last counted click is not counted again.
• Visits from the Outprint desk, and a publisher reading their own article.
• Crawlers, link previews, monitors, scripts and headless browsers, by their user agent.
• Browsers that report themselves as automated.
• Anything from a development machine or a preview deployment. Only the production site counts.
• More than 120 events a minute from one address, or 1,200 from one network, or more than 5,000 new readers a day from one network. Floods are counted by the hour rather than stored event by event.
• Addresses published by cloud providers as their own: 13,332 ranges from aws, digitalocean, google-cloud, linode, oracle-cloud, last refreshed on September 16, 2026.
• A click without a read of the same article by the same reader in the last 30 minutes. A counted read hands the page a signed token, and a click counts only with it.
• Anything sent to the counting routes from somewhere other than an Outprint page.

Where we know we count too few

These are the honest gaps. They make our figures smaller than reality, never larger.

• Readers whose blocker stops the counting request are not counted at all.
• A reader with JavaScript off is not counted; the page is still served in full.
• Mobile carriers put many readers behind one address, so on a busy day some of them look like one reader, and a flood limit can reach a real crowd.
• A reader on a VPN whose exit sits in a cloud provider's range is set aside as data-centre traffic.
• Firefox does not send the browser ping, so a click there is counted only if the page's own report gets through.

How fresh a number is

Live figures are asked for again every five seconds on this desk, every fifteen in the masthead and every ten on a publisher's article. Hourly and daily summaries are rebuilt every five minutes, and any period they do not cover yet is counted from the events on the spot. Every live figure prints how old its reading is, and a refresh that failed keeps the old figure with its true age.

Days and time zone

A day is a Tbilisi day, from midnight to midnight, UTC+4. Boards, summaries and this ledger all use it.

What is kept

Events are kept: they are the record a buyer checks. No address is ever stored — the reader hash is made inside the database from that day's salt, and the salts are deleted after two days. The public log shows the minute, not the second, and nothing that links one day to another. Events are append-only: the database refuses to change or delete one, and each finished day is sealed in a public chain.

Check a number yourself

1. Open a private window and read any article.
2. Open "Verify your visit" under the paid link. It shows your receipt and whether your read counted.
3. Open the article's public log and find the same receipt in the day's list.
4. Follow the paid link, come back, and your click's receipt appears the same way.
5. Publishers can also line our monthly clicks up with their own analytics from the article's dashboard.
6. Every finished day is sealed with a fingerprint of all its events, chained to the day before. Download any day and recompute it on the record page. Check the record →