  CLARIN (Common Language Resources and Technology Infrastructure) is regarded
as one of the most important European research infrastructures, offering and
promoting a wide array of useful services for (digital) research in linguistics
and humanities. However, the assessment of the users for its core technical
development has been highly limited, therefore, it is unclear if the community
is thoroughly aware of the status-quo of the growing infrastructure. In
addition, CLARIN does not seem to be fully materialised marketing and business
plans and strategies despite its strong technical assets. This article analyses
the web traffic of the Virtual Language Observatory, one of the main web
applications of CLARIN and a symbol of pan-European re-search cooperation, to
evaluate the users and performance of the service in a transparent and
scientific way. It is envisaged that the paper can raise awareness of the
pressing issues on objective and transparent operation of the infrastructure
though Open Evaluation, and the synergy between marketing and technical
development. It also investigates the "science of web analytics" in an attempt
to document the research process for the purpose of reusability and
reproducibility, thus to find universal lessons for the use of a web analytics,
rather than to merely produce a statistical report of a particular website
which loses its value outside its context.
