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.
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.
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?
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 :)
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.