How does the visitor count work?

I look at the stats for visitor counts in the search menu and every ones seem to go up daily. My stats change daily showing only the amount of visitors for one day. I originally had over 2000 visitors but it started falling and now I have 142. Quite a difference.

There's a brief article in the Knowledge Base regarding Traffic but a better explanation is located in the SL History Wiki:

http://slhistory.org/index.php/Traffic

Traffic counts as 1 "point" per avie per minute from the first minute, although no Linden will actually back that up, despite evidence to the contrary.

Get to a parcel with no traffic, log an alt on and have it spend 30 minutes there before logging it off for the entire day. Wait 24 hours and check traffic, it'll say 30. Now rinse and repeat with a variable amount of minutes and you'll find the traffic number is always the amount of minutes spent on that parcel, and how long you stay online and where else you go for really doesn't factor into it at all anymore.

Kitty I found that to be true and had worked my traffic count up to 1690. The next day it dropped to 620 and the next day to 40 and then today it registered 135. These are the stats coming from the search module and not the count on my about land page although they both say the same thing.

Thanks Kitty, I have to agree with your reckoning. The LL explanation makes no sense at all and yours does.