_sgo4

Side projects are where it's at, because they're typically low cost up front. You're just doing it for yourself. If no one likes it then you can ditch it or just use it for yourself for whatever purpose. No big loss. But if it turns out you're building something that people are passionate about, then you can turn it into a business without all the risk of going into it like a business from the very beginning.

http://getclicky.com started as an internal project for another company I worked for a few years ago. It was profitable 4 months after launch, and revenues are doubling ever year. 2010 will be about $1M. We are happy with that.

Fair enough. But that's also one of the reasons we're successful, because we make stats/analytics easy to understand. GA is a very powerful piece of software but it also has a fairly steep learning curve. A lot of our users are ex-GA users who stopped using GA because they just didn't get it.

We have plenty of users who use both Clicky and GA together though. Clicky does "most" of what people need and they like the real time aspect, but when they really need to dig deep into complex analysis, that's when they hit up GA.

Well the more traffic a site has, the more resources we need to process that traffic. 500,000 daily page views is currently the max we allow to ensure our service runs smoothly for everyone. This limit is higher than most other analytics services allow, and easily covers 99.9% of the sites on the internet.

Hmm, I see how some people might be confused by that, since page views are typically talked about in monthly terms. I updated the registration page to list both daily and monthly limits.

Could you elaborate on your gripe? (I'm the co-founder/lead dev)

What do you like about Woopra more than Clicky?

I agree about the overcount vs undercount thing, but I think Clicky's method is much closer to the "truth" of site engagement. Tabs aren't used much outside of the "power user" world. Typically when people go to a page, it is the page they are reading.

We do want to make it smarter and only ping when the tab is in the foreground, as that will make it more accurate. It's a planned update for the future.

The problem is that "bounce" is a broken metric. It implies that people "bounced away" from your site very quickly because they didn't find it engaging. But the standard definition of a bounce is simply a single pageview visit. It needs redefining, because there are plenty of single pageview visits that do actually engage the reader. e.g. reading this article - I bet a lot of you read it but didn't read any other articles on the site. GA would probably report 90% bounce rate for these visits, but Clicky would be more like 20-30%, which is much more accurate measurement of how many people are actually engaging with the site.

Clicky tracks visitors with javascript disabled.

It's even cheaper if you build your servers yourself and colocate them at a datacenter. Of course, not every company has a sysadmin, but if you do, you will save a bundle. This also means supporting them yourself, though, which at times can suck a fat one.

At Clicky, we have almost 30 servers, all of which we built ourselves. Up front cost is about $1500 per server, and monthly cost is $75 each. If we were leasing servers of similar capacity (RAID, 8GB+ RAM each) they would cost us a minimum of $400 per server per month, which would total close to $12,000 per month. By doing stuff ourselves we instead pay around $3500 per month (~$2000 hosting, and approx. 1 new server installed per month). That's serious money in the bank. I'm not counting sysadmin salary in that figure though, because I am the sysadmin. Still, if you have the capability, it's worth it.

I dont think it's a big problem :) Justin.tv is certainly amongst the top 1% of sites in the world, in terms of traffic. If you have a site that has more than 5,000 simultaneous users, you are a very very large site. There are very few sites that can claim that kind of traffic.

There aren't many products meant for tracking a site like that, and the ones that do cost thousands per month. You are paying just $10 for chartbeat. They are probably losing a lot of money on your account just on the bandwidth consumed.

I mean in the nicest possible way, but we don't have any desire to track sites that big. The largest we allow is 500,000 daily page views, and sites that big are paying us at leat $100 per month.

Unlike Google, we are a small company and don't have millions to throw at hosting data centers all around the world on insanely fast connections. So it is very understandable that our code loads a bit slower. It is certainly a high priorty that our service has as little effect as possible on third party sites, but competing with Google is tough business!

Thanks. If you compare us to any other analytics servic that charges money, I think you will find our prices for the amount of page views you can track are amongst the very lowest in the business. In fact, as far as I know, we are the lowest. I invite you to prove me wrong!

You basically have four real options for real time analytics, and they all either cost money, or are in beta and soon will cost money.

1. Chartbeat. $10/month. Pretty slick, honestly, especially if you only care about "right now".

2. Woopra. Free while in private beta. Getting accepted into the beta typically takes several weeks. Used to see tons of complaints about bugs and inaccurate stats. Seems to be less of an issue these days.

3. Mint. $30 per site. Self hosted / installed. Plugin system to add custom functionality.

4. Clicky. My personal favorite. Over 100,000 sites use it, so it must be at least pretty good, right?

Disclaimer: I made Clicky.

And how many sites would that ever apply to? Like, 10 total sites?

We've got access to the people who run the 100,000 web sites being monitored by getclicky.com (same team). We shouldn't have a problem there.

FYI, Contenture is about a lot more than ads. It's also the dead simplest way to create premium features for your site with very very little work.

Oh, ok. I interpreted your comment to mean that no major service could pull real time analytics beacuse it's just too hard. Sure we're a lot smaller than Google but 200,000 is a pretty big number if I do say so myself.

getclicky.com monitors over 200,000 sites and it's real time. Sure it's challenging to provide that level of service but without challenge life is dull.

It does say that in the paragraph right above the table. For sure, adding another column would make it more obvious, but I feel like that would be overwhelming. I have a problem with the number of columns we have already :)

Does it really cut off ~ URLs? No one has ever mentioned that to me. I'll look into it.

Of course, we normally log full referrers, even dynamic ones, so you can see the actual sites linking to you. It's not such a big issue more recently, but it used to be nearly every tracking service would cut out the query parameters, making referrer tracking not very useful.

We allow sites up to 300K daily. The default plans just go up to 100K, but you can create a custom plan also.

Yes, Clicky is more visitor centric, including tracking custom data per visitor, but plenty of good overview data as well. Plus the whole thing is real time, including goals and campaign tracking. Plus a very powerful API. Check out the Spy feature too.

GA does a number of things that Clicky doesn't, but the opposite is also true, as you can see by the handy dandy matrix you mentioned.

Disclaimer: I am the developer. :P

We can work out a deal for sites like that that just have lots of sub-domains. Just contact us via email if you sign up and need something special like that.

Thank you!

That's EXACTLY what we do at Clicky - http://getclicky.com

We support the option to host the javascript yourself, but before you can do that, you must check a box that says "I am hosting it myself". This flags that user/site in our database, so whenever we release updates to the javascript, we can automatically notify all of the users that there is a new version available.

We make a lot of minor modifications to the code but usually only announce updates when there are new features in it, or if certain features of the old tracking code may no longer work for some reason (this has never happened so far but I can't guarantee it will always be that way)

PS: I'm the Clicky developer, so that's why I know all this.

Clicky has an API and real time + historical data - http://getclicky.com

Lucky for you, the developer of Clicky actually reads this web site. (Yeah, that'd be me).

#1 and #2 (API and real time) we have been doing at Clicky for a LOOOOOOOONG time. I still am in awe that Google hasn't released an API - that's just insane.

A lot of ad networks suck big time. AdSense is decent if your site is content oriented, e.g. articles about specific thigns or whatever. If you run a service like I do however (getclicky.com) then these types of ad networks don't work at all. Plus AdSense seems to be real anal and your account can get canned at any time without explanation and no chance of getting it back. Wow, that's fun.

A lot of ad networks also have a 30-90 day pay delay which sucks when you're just getting started.

If you have a decent amount of traffic, say at least 2,000 daily visiors or 20,000 daily page views, you should be able to sell ads directly without any problem. You set your own price and cut out the middle man and swim in the money.

However the problem with this is that you have to deal with inquiries all the time, worry about billing (unless you have an automated billing system setup already for something else that you can integrate ads into as well). So this service came along called BuySellAds.com that we now use on getclicky.com for our ads. We still set the price and decide how many ads we want to sell, what size, etc. And they deal with all teh billing and take a 25% cut. I think that's reasonable for the automation they provide. Before we switched to them I was dealing with advertising billing and inquiries for many hours every month. They also allow you to cash out at any time. Because of this I highly recommend the service.

Hate to break it to you, but the semantic web is a fairly tale, and is not arriving anytime soon.