Outliers and Outright Liars

Just to demonstrate how statistics can lie or, at least, disguise the actual numbers, take a look at the hit counts for the Comic Genesis page.

Take a look at the Average Daily Visits and the Average Daily Hits for the last few months:

Month	Visits	Hits
Sep 2008	95	1297
Oct 2008	88	1243
Nov 2008	79	878
Dec 2008	259	3411

Hey! I suddenly got popular! People are showing up in droves every day!
Not quite.

Here's the daily breakdown:

On Dec. 16, I had 3,464 visitors, who made 52,121 hits on my pages, mostly due to a one-day link in the News section of Irregular Webcomic, after the pseudo-crossover. Sadly, the large majority of them didn't come back. I could figure out what my average would be excluding that one day, but I'm afraid to.