TechFold - Bold tech & web commentary

Google Buying Feedburner; Feeds are another media like Radio, Print, or WWW

TC breaks it: GOOG is buying Feedburner for 100M. WatchMojo covers the origins of FB’s 10 million in VC funding, DeepJive says it only makes sense, and SEW sums up some good advantages for Google.

Holistic Analytics and Advertising

From where I’m sitting, it make sense. Feeds have been out in left field for a long time in terms of a consistent means of measuring their audience and impact on site traffic; with this acquisition and their existing analytics portfolio, Google has a means to connect all of the dots and create a truly holistic means of looking at sites.

Of course this also means that Google can expand their ad inventory as well, offering feeds as another media channel to advertisers. Feeds have evolved into another “media,” so to speak, and as Google has tried to expand into print and radio, so they are taking a stab at RSS.

Creepy

One final thought: as is mentioned more and more, Google’s reach is sort of creeping me out. The Internet is increasingly at the mercy of Google’s “Don’t be Evil” motto - here’s hoping they stick to it.

analytics, feedburner, google, news, rss, stats techcrunch

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Hey Scobleizer: Here’s a Solution for Web Stats

Scoble blogs tonite on how stats services generally seem to suck: they don’t agree with each other, they don’t agree with server logs, they don’t match up with experience.

The same frustration drove me to posting weeks ago when I proposed a unique solution: Google should let web masters make a subset of their Analytics data public. Of course, this doesn’t address Scoble’s questions about the conceptual thinking about stats - i.e.: are pageviews still relevant?

The original post is here. The gist of it, quoting myself:

Adding a “Sharing” option to Google Analytics and surfacing stats in “site:” searches (for those site owners who have elected the sharing option in their Analytics account) would do the job nicely. Let site owners control the degree of information shared, keep everything opt-in, and rock and roll. I know I’d share my high-level views & visits stats in a second. In addition to providing all of the value Alexa does, it would also add a layer of transparency to making ad-buys - something else I would appreciate.

I still think this would be a great idea, and would be more than happy to share my stats this way. What about you?

alexa, analytics, compete, google, scoble, scobleizer stats

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E-Skating.com - I can see your stats in Google Analytics

My partner-in-crime at HDDb.net and UpcomingDiscs.com logged into Google Analytics this morning and was surprised to have access to the stats of e-Skating.com - a French cross-country skiing site with which we are definitely not affiliated, and have most definitely not added in Analytics.

Is this a demo site or something for the beta? Or is this a legitimate error?

analytics, error, google, privacy, skiing, stats xcskiing

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Hitwise Acquired by Experian, $240 million in cash

Hitwise has been bought by general analytical service provider Experian (12k ee’s, 3.1bn revenue). News from Marketing Pilgrim, via TechMeme. Incidentally, Hitwise has an interesting approach to collecting stats, gathering metrics directly from ISP’s:

Hitwise has developed proprietary software that Internet Service Providers (ISPs) use to analyze website usage logs created on their network. The anonymous data sent to Hitwise from the ISPs include a range of industry standard metrics relating to the viewing of websites including page requests, visits and average visit length.

Hitwise also combines this rich ISP data with a worldwide opt-in panel to overlay demographic, lifestyle and transactional behavior across the thousands of websites that are reported on every day.

A great service (though I haven’t used it myself) built on top of a solid technology base and business model = big sale. Congrats to Hitwise!

experian, hitwise stats

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Valleywag to Drudge: Thanks for the “load”

Valleywag reports that Matt Drudge has published his best month of stats yet - 425,371,511 “loads” for the month of March. Unfortunately, “loads” refers to each time the Drudge Report home page has been loaded; and unfortunately, Druge has an innocuous meta tag at the top of their page (check the code your self to verify):

<META HTTP-EQUIV=“refresh” content=“180″>

Yes, that snippet reloads the DrudgeReport in your browser every 180 seconds without fail, whether anyone’s in front of your computer or not. What does that mean for Drudge’s reported numbers? Well - without a robust public stats solution, its impossible to say. We can make some inferences and assumptions based on the numbers Drudge does report, however:

Divide that 425,371,511 by 31 = ~13.8 million loads/day.

Ok - that daily number must be the product of the following:

(Unique Visitors) + (Return Visits) + (Idle Refreshes) = Daily Visits

Assumption #1: Each Drudge fan checks the site 5x during a day. The first visit would identify them as a unique for that day, leaving 4 subsequent visits. Ok, my algebra is a little shaky here, but here’s a revised formula.

[(1) + (4) + (Idle Refreshes)] x (# of Drudge fans) = 13.8M

Now - let’s assume that the average Drudge fan leaves their PC on with the Drudge Report loaded during lunch hour and during dinner and LOST - that’s 3 hours, or 180 minutes, which by virtue of Drudge’s meta tag, yeilds 60 loads:

[(1) + (4) + (60)] x (# of fans) = 13.8M

So - 13.8M / 65 = ~212,000 uniques. Multiply uniques by the “legit” pageviews in this example (4 + 1 = 5), and you’ve got ~1.1 M page views.

Ok, so my numbers are the most blatant of random estimates. But the point is that plugging some random numbers into the equation really shows the power of that meta-refresh tag to inflate Drudge’s stats.

You can fool around with your own numbers: I put together a Google Sheet with the equation described above, feel free to plug in your own numbers and see what pops out. Click here to get to the sheet.

EDIT: I’ve never shared a GSheet before, so if its funged up, comment and I’ll try to fix it.

clickfraud, drudge stats

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How Google Can Kill Alexa in One Simple Step

Alexa drives me nuts. The fact that their stats are skewed, gamed, and untrustworthy makes them unusable, but often they are the only recourse to add any sort of quantitative analysis to a post. So - it would be great to have a real alternative, and Google has the data, the sharing infrastructure, and the non-evil political will to do so.

Adding a “Sharing” option to Google Analytics and surfacing stats in “site:” searches (for those site owners who have elected the sharing option in their Analytics account) would do the job nicely. Let site owners control the degree of information shared, keep everything opt-in, and rock and roll. I know I’d share my high-level views & visits stats in a second. In addition to providing all of the value Alexa does, it would also add a layer of transparency to making ad-buys - something else I would appreciate.

Here are some ideas on implementation - click each to view the full screenshot.

Of course not everyone would share their stats, and not everyone uses Google Analytics, so I suppose Alexa would persist - but at least it would plant the meme out there that other alternatives can exist, beyond crappy (Alexa) and expensive (hitwise).

alexa, google, hitwise stats

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