November 14, 2005

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 and learned to decipher its many pie charts, and eventually other contenders came along. Of course there were always the commercial products 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 relased mint and Jeff Veen announced that he’d been working on a product called Measure Map for Adaptive Path. 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 has launched Google 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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