Numbers do matter in certain contexts, even if they don't matter to you Hrothgar. For instance, if someone wanted to by the site from Max and Dick, the numbers would matter a great deal. Also, if grants and funding of that sort is being looked into (as is occassionally threatened by Max in threads here), the numbers matter too.

Just for comparison sake, I was reading an ad in a 2000 issue of Bon Appetit magazine last night, which showed one of my fave epicurean food websites gets 14 million hits a month, compared to the stats Max gave for the turn of the millenium (16 Dec 1999) of 3 million hits a month.

Oddly, I did a Google search yesterday using the keywords "American folk music" and Mudcat never even turned up.