If you are, or are planning on, blogging professional and/or earning revenue with your blogging, you probably know by now that you need to be able to analyze your blog/ sites web traffic. You’ve probably already heard of Google Analytics. However, if you are still on their waiting list, or have passed the current (at the time of writing) quota of only 5 profiles, there are several alternatives. One alternative that I came across today is StatCounter.com.

StatCounter.com seems to have a rather comprehensive and free offering of several web metrics. I tried out their demo and found that in some ways, certain reports are easier to retrieve than in Google Analytics. Their site also loads faster than Google’s, which I presume is due to handling far fewer sites.

I was about to sign up for the service to test it out, until I read the item 12 of the Terms and Conditions page:

We both own the data regarding visitors to your Web site that we collect. You can use the data we provide for any legal purposes. We will use the data in compliance with our privacy policy.

This really bothers me. My data is my data, regardless of where it’s stored and who collected it. I could be wrong, but I’m pretty sure that Google does not make this requirement. If it does, I’ll have to rethink whether I’ll continue using their service. I won’t be using StatCounter. But if this sort of condition does not bother you, then you may want to check out their otherwise useful service. They do have a limit of 9,000 “pageloads” per day, which. I assume is the same as pageviews.

(c) Copyright: 2006-present, Raj Kumar Dash, http://blogspinner.countwordula.com/

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