Every time I see a privacy outrage thread over here I think about how many readers/commenters on this site work for advertising/tracking companies or companies whose products include tracking code. (Full disclosure: I don’t.)

Probably because there isn’t a good free analytics service that is easy to use (no need for self-hosting) and is able to collect the info that one wants. GA is free, and easy.

This was sourced from a posting asking people to promote their blog. People that promote their blogs are likely going to have some kind of analytics tool installed. Also, lots of blog platform sites come with analytics built in and some of those use Google.

Or perhaps you think there are more people against GA here than there actually are.

I've wanted to dump GA forever, but it was only a year or so ago I finally took the plunge and set up Fathom analytics on my sites. Now I'm happier with the faster load times and the ability to control my own analytics data (though some of it is more limited since no cookies are used)... but I do have one more small VPS I'm maintaining pretty much in perpetuity (eventually it'll move to a personal K8s cluster but resources still cost a little).

The friction is just great enough that most people still stick with GA, since it's already pretty much everywhere.