Google wants 4chan to pay $150k per year to continue to use Analytics | Hacker News Reader

Google wants 4chan to pay $150k per year to continue to use Analytics

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25 pointskillwhitey10 comments

This isn't anything out of the ordinary or directed at 4chan (like the tweet is trying to say, in my opinion). Google Analytics is free for up to 10 million hits per month and then they ask you to upgrade to premium. Most people just assume that Google Analytics is free forever but there is a limit. I would agree that 150k per year is exorbitantly high for that service, however.

Sorry if this is a little off topic: I used to use Google Analytics but decided I wanted more control and something lighter weight (for client side web requests). I switched over to AWStats which is easy to set up and the generated reports contain enough data so I know what parts of my web sites are getting the most action.

Can't a big site like 4chan simply do it themselves?

My understanding is that traffic above 10M users will not be tracked by the free version of GA, but the service will continue working and recording visits. What 4chan will lose is information of all users above 10M, but will retain access to all the data.

I believe these emails from Google are phrased ambiguously to force upgrades.

I guess we may be seeing a story soon about 4chan swapping to an alternative analytics provider, I'm very interested to see what challenges Moot will run into whilst swapping over.

Whoever set this pricing staircase at Google needs to be fired. :)

I wonder if moot could post some of the analytics data? I'd be curious to see, for example, what boards get the most traffic, where users mostly come from, etc. etc.

/b/ and direct, and it's not even close.

Would Piwik be feasible on that level?

He replied to this question later in the comment thread:

    .@dummfilm @4chan @GoogleAnalytics We looked into @Piwik,
    but it doesn’t scale well to our traffic and would require
    additional server(s).

It might be possible to run piwik at 4chan's level of traffic, but I would think the cost of hosting would be pretty prohibitive for a 4chan scenario. That's assuming piwik could even handle 4chan's traffic out of the box. I think the largest known products using piwik are in the low to mid double digit MM pageviews per month, 4chan is at about half a billion pageviews per month.

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