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Comment by nuccy | Hacker News Reader

I'm honestly curious, are all the analytics tools, which rely on making third party queries, still efficient with extensive use of adblocking these days?

If not, then logs of webservers are the only 100% reliable place (if available of course), so old-style tools like awstats, Webalizer, etc [1] should have a rise in popularity again.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_web_analytics_software

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The issue is that people often use free reverse proxies like cloudflare, that do caching, so not all requests reach the original server.

In this case, the source of truth is cloudflare's loadbalancer, but you have to pay them to get full analytics.

Server side Analytics are far from reliable. Go and try Netlify, then you’ll see how unreliable they really are.

For us nerds, we can always block things using DNS level blocking but Fathom’s custom domain feature has done really well for the majority: https://usefathom.com/blog/custom-domains-embed-code

Good adblockers do DNS lookup to see if subdomain points to tracking server anyway.

Only completely self-hosted (your domain, your tracking server) solutions are resilient to adblocking

Interesting, then as a workaround trackers may create an image with pseudo-random src pointing to pageXXXwebsiteYYYclientZZZ.ad.yoursite.com (yoursite.com is the site which serves the actual content), while asking the owner to point NS record for ad.yoursite.com to IP of their DNS server. So HTTP/S request or DNS request can reach them anyway. Obviously DNS caching will prevent them from knowing how many times this particular page was accessed by this particular client, but at least they will know that it was accessed at least once.

You can set up a proxy, which isn't too hard (and operating a proxy is a lot simpler than operating an analytics service)

For now

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