50% of the top 10,000 sites use Google Analytics | Hacker News Reader

50% of the top 10,000 sites use Google Analytics

royal.pingdom.com

20 pointsemmett6 comments

This doesn't surprise me. (The fact in the headline not the urchin/ga split the article discusses.) Google Analytics is incredibly robust and reliable considering that it's free.

I always hear arguments against using it, but one has yet to win me over. My agency subscribed to LyrisHQ Clicktracks service for a year before canceling it in favor of just using Google Analytics and passing the savings on to clients. (Customer service was great with Lyris, but the interface was unintuitive and slow. It also costs an arm and a leg.)

The question is, are the owners of these sites aware that urchin.js won’t be around forever? Are they aware that they are using a legacy script that is no longer being maintained?

No, I had no idea. Google doesn't seem to have notified me of the change, and there is nothing in the UI of Analytics that warns that our code is the old version. A simple "Warning: you are using the old script on your site" banner would have caused me to upgrade immediately. I'm glad I read this article.

That means google has 50% of chances to have a good advantage in the negociation process when/if buying one of the top 10'000 websites. :)

Awesome point, although I would hope that their privacy policies would exclude them from that very possibility. Just because Google provides analytics does not mean they should have access to the specific data being collected.

I do believe unless you turn off the option of sharing your data with Google, they do have the ability. I am not a 100% sure, but I think so.

"Hope" that Google would not use information that it has within its own walls to its business advantage is not a wise strategy.

I see nothing in Analytics' written TOS or Google's general Privacy Policy (because Analytics has no Privacy Policy of its own) that would prevent Google management/business-development from looking at Analytics data to evaluate any participating site. The same goes whether they are researching that site as an acquisition, competitor, or source of potential ideas.

In fact, I see nothing in their written policies suggesting any limits on the use of any information within Google at all, as long as such use has anything to do with "providing our services" or "developing new services".

The same thing goes for Toolbar and AdSense data, with respect to websites or individuals.

So, for example, if applying for a job at Google, there's nothing in their public policies that say they couldn't correlate your Google login with AdSense/Analytics/Toolbar data to examine your browsing history. I don't know that they've ever done that, and I would expect a big backlash if it became known that they did, but it's an example of something that doesn't violate their stated policies.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com