My opinion of counters is that they are a great way for your traffic to leave your site. Most of them don't give you anything except the stats and you should be able to get them from your host or by running your logs through some software like webtrends.
The two exceptions to this, that I've found, are
1)
www.thecounter.com which has an "invisible" option so that the counter doesn't steal your traffic
2)
www.paycounter.com who will pay you $0.05 per unique clickthru so you at least get something for the traffic you are losing to them.
TheCounter.com charges $15.95/year and the stats are pretty weak.
I just put PayCounter on all my doorways and I really like the referrer stats they give me but I haven't been using them long enough to receive any cheques yet.
If you want really detailed stats that will tell you where your surfers come from, what pages they visit and what pages they leave from (that one's key!) then something like WebTrends is the way to go.
Just my
