Looks interesting, will try it out.
Is there a roadmap or planned features page for fathom?
Fathom – Simple, trustworthy website analytics
31–40 of 122 posts
Re: Fathom – Simple, trustworthy website analytics
#32Out of curiosity, and as someone who has never used website analytics: why do we need a third party for this? Couldn't a bit of client side code + server side code do all the work these days?
Do you want a customer or a slave?
If you sell software, you have a customer that can do whatever they like.
If you provide SAAS you can tie in the user more and more.
Re: Fathom – Simple, trustworthy website analytics
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think it's naive or oversimplified. If you don't pay for the product, then someone is paying for the product - either it's taking a loss (venture capital burn, self hosting), another person is paying for it (donations, freemiums) or your data is being used for profit. If your data is used for profit, you and your data is what the company sells to other people. By definition you are the product. Whether that's…
> If your data is used for profit, you and your data is what the company sells to other people. By definition you are the product. The reason this is naive and oversimplified is that, say, Google, does not sell your data . Your data is their competitive advantage and they have every reason to not sell it. There is no service Google provides where someone can go in and request your data or access it. Advertisers are g…
does not sell your data
Depends on how you define sell.
Advertisers pay to use the Google's collected data about people in order to better target their ads. This happens through Google's advertising channels (Doubleclick, AdWords, etc...)
Money changes hands. Personal data is involved. Sounds like selling to me.
Perhaps you should say "Google does not directly sell copies of your data," instead. But there is indeed a transaction involving personal data.
Re: Fathom – Simple, trustworthy website analytics
#34No complaints about the little I can see of the service here, and the point of protecting the privacy of our users is well-taken. But at the same time, stats packages have been available for year simply by parsing your server logs (awstats, etc). Old solutions still work, even if the problem space is evolving in new directions.
Haven't touched awstats for the best part of a decade. What is the new shiny on these server log tools? Why is it that not one SEO organisation/company/snake-oil salesperson ever thinks to look at the server logs? One problem that Progressive Web App/server worker solves is catching those messages that don't get sent to Google Analytics and making sure they are sent. You would think that server stats offer a level of…
> Why is it that not one SEO organisation/company/snake-oil salesperson ever thinks to look at the server logs?
When you're hosted on S3, etc, you don't get access to the logs.
For larger sites which are hosted across a number of webservers, behind a load-balancer, getting a unified access-log is also a little fiddly.
But I guess the honest answer is that it's not trendy enough these days. With Javascript submission of "stuff" you get much more data about your visitors than you can glean from the server-side logs.
Re: Fathom – Simple, trustworthy website analytics
#35This doesn't come even close to the type of data you can get from Google Analytics. It's nice as a free/open source service, but the power just isn't there. Even piwik/matomo is vastly inferior to what kind of data you can track and visualize in Google Analytics.
This is the issue I've found with every open source product. I'm perfectly happy to pay for an analytics product, so the best I've been able to find is adobe Omniture. Unfortunately that's a 30 - 100k price tag. There is definitely a market for a powerful analytics platform at a reasonable price.
Re: Fathom – Simple, trustworthy website analytics
#36Out of curiosity, and as someone who has never used website analytics: why do we need a third party for this? Couldn't a bit of client side code + server side code do all the work these days?
You don't need it. Most SaaS applications are like 90% of the B2C market: It's for convenience.
Please check out https://matomo.org (former name Piwik) for open-source self-hosted website analytics (with server logs support)
Re: Fathom – Simple, trustworthy website analytics
#37is this trustworthy ? how it is free and does not collect user information. so what it gets for providing us this service for free ?
It is self hosted
Re: Fathom – Simple, trustworthy website analytics
#38This doesn't come even close to the type of data you can get from Google Analytics. It's nice as a free/open source service, but the power just isn't there. Even piwik/matomo is vastly inferior to what kind of data you can track and visualize in Google Analytics.
This is the issue I've found with every open source product. I'm perfectly happy to pay for an analytics product, so the best I've been able to find is adobe Omniture. Unfortunately that's a 30 - 100k price tag. There is definitely a market for a powerful analytics platform at a reasonable price.
Since it sounds like you've tried a good number of options, what do you think about Mixpanel? We used it at the startup I used to work at and I mostly enjoyed it although we didn't go to deep.
Re: Fathom – Simple, trustworthy website analytics
#39For people looking for similar options, there's also Matomo[1] (previously Piwik) that you can self-host for free. [1] https://matomo.org/
Matomo is really good. I use this.
Re: Fathom – Simple, trustworthy website analytics
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
This may have been true at one point, but I don't think it's true anymore. https://www.google.com/analytics/terms/us.html https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/6004245 https://policies.google.com/technologies/partner-sites Interesting aside: Google Analytics customers are required to prominently state that their site uses Google Analytics. I suspect many, if not most, customers don't do this.
It's admittedly confusing, but I think I'm still right and that you may be conflating policies about other google services. From your second link, which is specific to Analytics, it says: > What is the data used for? > Google uses Google Analytics data to provide the Google Analytics measurement service to customers. Identifiers such as cookies and app instance IDs are used to measure user interactions with a custome…
I think it does, because I recall years ago their privacy policy explicitly saying that they don't use GA data for any other purposes. I don't have a source to back that up, but I've noticed that their privacy policy has grown to be somewhat labyrinthine since then, and I couldn't find that explicit statement anymore.