David McCreath

In the olden days, we were happy with hit counters. We could tell how many people had loaded a given page by looking at the cool graphic numbers down at the bottom. Then as we learned more about how to use our hosting accounts, we became familiar with [analog](http://analog.cx) and learned to decipher its many pie charts, and eventually other [contenders](http://awstats.sourceforge.net) came along. Of course there were always the [commercial products](http://webtrends.com) that were used by the e-commerce sites, but I’m talking about the personal publisher of 2005.
In the last few months, there have been two notable ripples in the stats pond: [Shaun Inman](http://shauninman.com) relased [mint](http://haveamint.com) and [Jeff Veen](http://veen.com/jeff/) [announced](http://www.veen.com/jeff/archives/000799.html) that he’d been working on a product called [Measure Map](http://measuremap.com) for [Adaptive Path](http://adaptivepath.com). Both promise well-designed and well-analyzed reports of your site’s performance; a more human approach to understanding who’s using your site and how.
Then today came the announcement that [Google](http://google.com) has launched [Google Analytics](http://google.com/analytics) and made it available to anyone for up to 5 million page views per month. Buy an AdSense account for $5 and you get unlimited page views, presumably even if you don’t put ads on your site.
Is this just a few smart people recognizing an untapped market or the start of something more interesting? And can we expect something similar from Yahoo! some time soon?

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