[svlug] Web statistics

[Don Marti]

begin Chris DiBona quotation of Tue, Jun 03, 2008 at 01:37:30PM -0700:

> I'm not surprised at all, I assure you, but when a person wants to
> track the traffic coming to their site, and if they want to do it with
> a non-installed option, then the vast majority of browsers run
> javascript and don't block much of anything.

For one Linux site, I periodically compare the
stats from the raw logs vs. the stats from the
(well-known, in every list including the RBHL)
3rd-party ad server.  Less than 1% ad blocking.

There are a few quick ways for content
sites to defeat ad blocking (example:
http://www.linuxworld.com/community/?q=node/1412 )
and none of them are worthwhile because none of the
ad blocking techniques are common enough to matter.

But even if you're using Google Analytics or Hitbox
for the writing or marketing team you still need to do
something with the raw logs, to watch out for broken
crawlers and other abuse.

-- 
Don Marti                    
http://zgp.org/~dmarti/
dmarti at zgp.org