Yahoo to Take on Google Analytics
whencanistop writes "Having seen Google set up their Google Analytics product for free (in an attempt to get everyone to spend more money on adwords) and then seen Microsoft release their version of a free web analytics tool into beta, Yahoo have decided to do the same thing, by buying someone else and releasing it into the wild for free. Great news for bloggers who don't want to sign up for Google's 'evil' plans."
Forgot I reinstalled my system, so I wasn't logged in.. doh.
How was DoubleClick evil? I'm not sure I get it. I worked there for 6 years, and know a lot about what went on. So I'm not really sure where they got such a bad reputation, other than they did what everyone else was doing and were successful at it.
That said, I will admit that the purchase and suggested integration of the offline catalog thingy (Abacus I think), was not well thought out, but I would also say that someone was going to try it, and they laid off as soon as it got to be an issue.
Otherwise, what does DCLK do? For the most part they are simply the middleman between the advertisers and the producers. Somehow they have a worse reputation than DeBeers, and they are the axe murderers of middlemen.
It's not like any of the sites that DCLK does business would suddenly just not have ads if DCLK never existed. DCLK didn't make popups to my knowledge. They were simply a transmission medium (ISP in some minds, virus in others, lol) that provided reporting and targeting for advertisers across multiple sites when the major sites were sort of walled fortresses. Meaning you had to book ads with Yahoo specifically through their ad dept., then go to Altavista, and book ads directly with them, etc. They just standardized things and made it so advertisers just had to learn one system to book ads on all of them.
I'm sure I'll earn some bad karma for this, but I am interested in the actual details of what they do that is different from everyone else in the business that singles them out.
http://blog.slaingod.com