I featured a 468×60 Google AdSense block in the footer of this blog since 2004-08-30, and included Google Analytics javascript since 2006-12-29. I failed to note adding either.
I’m behind on my 8 year blog refutation schedule, will probably do a six middle months post rather than Q2 and Q3 separately; see Q1. In the meantime, I’ll note removing AdSense and Analytics now.
I added AdSense as a small way of getting to know a hugely significant part of the net a little better through direct experience. My revenue expectations were met over the years — trivial, due to trivial traffic and relatively innocuous placement. Viewing my blog with a browser sans adblock and with flash for the first time in perhaps years just now prompted the removal and this post, which I had planned to do in the fullness of time — the innocuous placement was still ugly, and with flash enabled all of the ads are graphical and many animated. Clearly I have learned all I am capable of learning via this experiment, which I am glad I did. If I ever have something characterized as third party ads here again, it’ll be via some very different mechanism.
I more dimly recall adding Analytics because I never looked at log analysis generated reports, and maybe if I looked I would find something to optimize. I seldom looked at Analytics, and never discerned anything. If I really feel the urge to look again, I’ll use a log analysis program, and if I want an Analytics-like interface, use Piwik. I realize for some analysis, and especially some experiments, in-page javascript can be very helpful. If I ever really want to do that, Piwik can.
Relatedly, I’ve meant to recommend Don Marti’s blog for a long time, when I got around to saying and doing more about net advertising, but don’t wait for me.
Heya! I haven’t talked about it yet, because I haven’t had time to set up an SSL cert on it, but I have a Piwik instance running at http://analytic.sx (depending on the day, it is ANALYTICS X or Analytic Sux).
It is setup to respect “do not track” requests, and only logs two octets of IP addresses. I was planing on offering it to folks if they agree to publicize their stats (the default page goes to my stats).
If you don’t mind it being over a non-SSL connection (for now), I can hook ya up with an account. ^_^
Good naming/name interpretation…
Send me mail, I’ll try it, moved in part by sight of Robinson projection map rather than the usual Mercator derivative. ^_^
Also, you remind me that I thought at one point that when I eventually turned off GA and wrote about it that I should observe and speculate about how in the early days of the web, lots of sites made the output of their log analysis programs publicly accessible, but I haven’t seen that in a very long time. Was the change due to spam, increased commercialism and attendant secrecy, logfile management pain, ugly analysis output, other, more?
And now it is gone from my blog. Set it up in Jan of this year for why? Wasn’t even enjoyable to do.
Wouldn’t mind sharing my browsing stats with Analytic Sux, though.
http://analytic.sx/index.php?module=CoreHome&action=index&idSite=2&period=day&date=today
It seems to really completely ignore requests that have DNT set.
Hmmm, not sure if that was sarcasm (when I checked the link there was an error). Growing pains, that site is showing to anonymous users now. I would be jazzed to verify it is completely ignoring DNT requests, though!
Greg, I will email ya login details. There is a plugin to allow folks to sign up, but it is a patch in a trac ticket, and I am not sure it would set up the site properly, so for now we are at human scale. So tell your friends, but maybe only one a week. ^_^
Not sarcasm; when I visit with DNT turned on it doesn’t show up in Piwik.
[…] door-to-door-like incentives (everything to make immediate conversion, nothing to build trust). I still have not gotten around to blogging other ideas for “fixing” online advertising, but […]