Good Morning….Today:
– Google announced it is making its web analytics (Urchin, which it purchased some time ago) free to all. My big beef with Urchin is how much disk space it uses (it keeps everything so it quickly eats up your storage). So I hope this hosted solution will solve that.
Update: Not a swift rollout...
– AOL announced a big video deal (not surprisingly, with Warner). Clearly it intends to compete here.
John, I’m curious your take on this: it would seem that Google’s biggest benefit in giving the software away is the tracking data they get on web use. Now in addition to understanding a user’s intent at the time of the initial search, they get to follow that user’s behavior at the destination site and perhaps across the rest of the web at other participating sites as well.
Is this a Faustian bargain for website owners? What do they stand to loose by giving Google access to this information about their site vs. using a third party vendor who isn’t also their biggest source of traffic?
Is there a reason to resist giving Google access to site-use data, or do they already have this information anyway by virtue of the tracking they do on the user side?