Blast from the past: while digging up directory sites I found that the hosted stats provider Extreme Tracking is still around. I used to see these all over Geocities, Tripod and other free hosted HTML pages.
The free version only monitors one page, but that was fine back in 1998, because websites either only had one page or most traffic came in through the Index page. It was a very different time.
Then and now the free version required you to display the Tracking button on the page. Click on the button and you get to see the last 20 referrers to that page because the stats were public and could not be locked behind a login.
The benefits of that:
- Discover new places to visit. Most traffic came from other websites, so the tracker was a good way to find different sites, usually on the same subject.
- Find out how much traffic the site had and who was referring it (stuff like what sites were popular and which webrings had traffic.
- As a niche directory owner, it was a good way to find new sites to list in the directory.
I did add it to the Web Analytics Category in the directory.
