Last week, Yahoo! purchased enterprise-level web analytics service provider IndexTools. Yesterday, Dennis Mortensen, COO of Index Tools, announced on his blog that Yahoo! would be setting the service free. The decision to offer a free analytics suite follows similar moves by Google and Microsoft. Google released Analytics (which we use here on ReadWriteWeb) in November 2005, drawing on software it acquired from Urchin and Adaptive Path, and Microsoft's adCenter Analytics is based on Deep Matrix, which it acquired in 2006.
IndexTools, which currently cost between $49.95 and $249.00, is now free for any current customer willing to sign a new Yahoo! service agreement. So far 3,000 customers have done so, according to Mortensen. Right now, the free version is only for current IndexTools clients, but we can probably expect Yahoo! to release a free version to the general public at the time of the next IndexTools update.
This is an important development for the analytics industry, but also for Yahoo! If Yahoo! can successfully attract web publishers to their free service -- and it is hard to see why they wouldn't be able to -- it means the ability to gather loads of aggregate data for their behavioral ad targeting initiatives.
It will be interesting to see what effect this analytics arms race has on Google and Microsoft's offerings, and what might happen if the Microsoft-Yahoo! deal goes through.
Listed below are links to blogs that reference this entry: Free Analytics Suite Coming From Yahoo!.
TrackBack URL for this entry: http://www.readwriteweb.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-tb.cgi/3775
Comments
Subscribe to comments for this post OR Subscribe to comments for all Read/WriteWeb posts
It will be interesting to see what effect this analytics arms race has on Google and Microsoft's offerings, and what might happen if the Microsoft-Yahoo! deal goes through.
Posted by: prefabrik | April 16, 2008 11:27 AMJust what I need, more paid competition turned free by subsidizing it with other businesses. How am I supposed to compete?
Posted by: Dan Grossman | April 16, 2008 12:22 PMTwo words: It's about time.
Live From Las Vegas
Posted by: The Masked Millionaire | April 16, 2008 12:35 PMThe Masked Millionaire
Is it clear now that Yahoo wants to play a vital role on the web? I predicted the free analytics, I am now predicting a co-operation with Amazon, or something relevant, to battle Google Apps.
Yahoo!
Posted by: SebKom | April 16, 2008 12:52 PM@Dan: For what it's worth, I still find W3Counter's analytics more useful for my purposes on Rails Forum than Google Analytics -- though use both.
Posted by: Josh CatoneWow, only 3 years late to the party? It'll be tough to convince publishers to switch from Analytics. But I'll admit it is a necessary piece of the puzzle (of publisher tools) that Yahoo needs to compete against the Google juggernaut.
Posted by: Dave | April 16, 2008 1:44 PM@Dave: Why switch? It's helpful to run more than one analytics package to get a complete picture of your web sites traffic.
Posted by: Josh Catoneif you are looking for an open source alternative to Google analytics, the future yahoo offering, try Piwik. Piwik is an open web analytics software, built on APIs and with a plugins architecture, that you can customize for your needs!
http://piwik.org
Posted by: Matt | April 16, 2008 4:41 PMGoogle may have the network behind them, which is a benefit especially now that they are providing industry averages. However, if Yahoo offers a better tool that also is free, I can see a consumer change in preference on the horizon.
Also, the major effect of running more than one analytics package, which offer the same features, is an increase concern for the validity of the data.
Posted by: Helen | April 17, 2008 6:23 AMThanks for information, it was very helpful.
Posted by: prefabrik hazır ev | April 23, 2008 8:56 AMI've been an IndexTools customer for about 4 years now and the services are fantastic. On pretty much every site that I own, I have Google Analytics and Indextools code in place.
With that said, I log into Indextools 7 days a week and log into Google Analytics about once every two weeks. That's I continued to pay them nearly $200 per month, because their analytics package was so much better than Google's.
If Yahoo can maintain the same services as offered by Indextools, it would be wise to give it a shot.
Just my 2 cents.
Posted by: How To Make A Website | May 9, 2008 5:30 PM