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Google Fonts Analytics

fonts.google.com

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Re: Google Fonts Analytics

#181

Post by thrownaway954 »

moftz wrote: post #87
LukeBMM wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With some extra metadata, about 428MB. https://github.com/google/fonts Since the browser hands font rendering off to the operating system, however, the most pertinent browser-specific adjustment would be updating the (configurable) defaults (Serif, Sans-serif, etc...) for each supported platform - Georgia instead of Times for a default, for example.

You bundle the top 10 most popular fonts and save about half the traffic: counter is ticking about 20M per minute or 201B per week, top 10 fonts were used 136B times this week, Chrome is about 3/4 of users. Bundling would save (136/201)*(3/4) = about 1/2. However, Google would lose about half of their tracking events so I'm sure they've already thought of this and figured the data is worth more than the traffic expen…

that to me is the real reason behind this service. it might not make money, but the statistics and insight they get are worth way more than money.

Re: Google Fonts Analytics

#182

Post by skrebbel »

raphlinus wrote: post #108
skrebbel wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Google has poured a lot of money into this Why, though? Not charity, I'd assume. The only other answers I can come up with are pretty damn nefarious.

I can speak to this a little, in terms of pitches we made to management to get resources for our little project. None of this is authoritative. 1. A lot of text was rendered into PNGs, and that made the web less searchable, as well as less accessible, slower to load, and less mobile-friendly. All 4 of these factors do have economic impact at Google scale. 2. Fonts were one of the few features that Flash had that HTML…

Wow, that makes a lot of sense. Clearly, my imagination was lacking. Thanks!

Re: Google Fonts Analytics

#184

Post by OrgNet »

raphlinus wrote: post #92
BiteCode_dev wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think it's still used for the latter rather than the former now?

Heh, that's a better question. I have no reason to believe that Google Fonts are being used to track users, but I don't have hard evidence on this either way. I am deeply concerned about the way the modern Internet is turning into a surveillance machine and its potential for abuse, but if I were evil, I'd probably go after much lower hanging fruit than fonts.

either way, loading fonts from google for every website is a stupid idea... it is why an extension like decentraleyes is a good idea (because most website don't think about the consequences).

Re: Google Fonts Analytics

#185

Post by jjeaff »

paxys wrote: post #37
jjeaff wrote: post #12

Wow, if you used Google Cloud CDN to serve up that data, it would cost you more than $1 Billion USD.

Got a source for that, or did you just make it up? Doing some very quick estimation I can't see it being more than $40-60 million, and that is using retail pricing.

I used the GCP pricing calculator. However, I used 1mb gzipped as the file size. But I now realize that is the entire Roboto font family in both otf and ttf, so I assume that what google fonts serves up is a smaller subset of those.

Re: Google Fonts Analytics

#186

Post by jjeaff »

kevindong wrote: post #139
paxys wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Got a source for that, or did you just make it up? Doing some very quick estimation I can't see it being more than $40-60 million, and that is using retail pricing.

I'm getting ~$130 million with these assumptions: * each font load is 170 KB (I downloaded Roboto and that's the file size of one weight) * 36.3 trillion font loads (per the source) * 36.3 trillion * 170 KB/font load = ~6171 PB [0] Plug 6171 PB into the GCP calculator [0] with all egress via GCP Cloud CDN to N. America and the bill comes out to just shy of $130 million. OP is off by an order of magnitude by my napkin…

You are correct. I used the same match, except I used a 1mb gzipped Roboto font family package. I now realize that what google actually serves up is a subset of that.

Re: Google Fonts Analytics

#189

Post by BiteCode_dev »

rememberlenny wrote: post #24
smaili wrote: post #22

Does anyone know whether this service generates any revenue for Google? I can’t see selling fonts data as something desirable by 3rd party companies but maybe that’s just me?

It does not, and they don't sell the data or use it for any tracking.

I'd like your thoughts on this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22394730

Re: Google Fonts Analytics

#190

Post by smichel17 »

commoner wrote: post #173
commoner wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Decentraleyes is an excellent add-on that improves browsing speed and privacy with no negative side effects. Currently, the only font cached by Decentraleyes is Noto Sans. It also caches Google's Web Font Loader script and many major JavaScript frameworks. https://decentraleyes.org https://git.synz.io/Synzvato/decentraleyes Web developers who are concerned about privacy exposure from Google Fonts can use google-webfo…

Correction: Decentraleyes doesn't actually cache any fonts. Noto Sans is just used for the add-on interface. Font caching would make an interesting feature if the add-on developer is willing to implement it, especially if it bypasses fingerprinting.

I stand corrected!
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