Image rendering of digits may use a variety of fonts and styles, with a classic design imitating the wheels of an odometer.
Web counters were often accompanied by the date it was set up or last reset, to provide more context to readers on how to interpret the number shown.
Counters were popular in the 1990s, but were later replaced by other web traffic measures such as self-hosted scripts like Analog, and later on by remote systems that used JavaScript, like Google Analytics.
Owing to their ubiquity, hit counters were also a useful tool to collect data on the global usage share of web browsers for a time.
In one SEO spamming technique, companies paid to have their site listed in the HTML code of a free hit counter.