Actually, there is. Contrary to what ninja rockstar hipster Wangular.js devs like to believe, not everyone runs an i7 on a gigabit fiber line. Little useless counters like that (who the hell cares how many people have viewed a page anyway? I sure as hell don't, and can surely survive without being bombarded with attention whoring) tend to add up. And even for those who do run an i7 and a gigabit fiber connection, it's invariably in response to little bullshit widgets like these clogging up CPU cores and network connections.

Sure, go ahead, downvote my comment while dismissing it with snide remarks. You're just contributing to the reasons why people disable Javascript or relegate it to on-demand / click-to-play functionality.