It ain’t what it was.
Once upon a time, it was awesome – it let me stalk you, track you, monitor you. I could set it so I got an e-mail when you – yes, you – were here. It would show me which pages you surfed, for how long. It let me develop an intimate understanding of your relationship to my blog.
This was valuable to me.
Recently, Woopra has put virtually all of their differentiating services – the things they do so well, so elegantly, so much better than anyone else – behind a pay wall. That’s all well and good: I generally prefer to pay for services, rather than being a product served up to advertisers.
But Woopra doesn’t want me as a customer. They want me to pay $50 a month (or, after I beg, $40) to get what I used to get for free. This is more than I pay for hosting, a far more valuable, if also more commoditized, service. But surely it’s just a matter of time before Google Analytics offers the same functionality, or better (Woopra is buggy, and imperfect), for free. And in the mean time, Woopra says, “But we’ll help you follow up to a million visitors a month!” Which is great. But I have fewer than 10,000 visitors a month. If $40 is the right price for a million, the right price for me is a fraction of that.
Surely, for folks like us, there’s a rationale for pricing more rationally.
Or maybe not. Maybe they don’t perceive the opportunity of having a loyal army of bloggers in their thrall as being worth the cost.
I don’t really question their business decision-making, but I do miss their data.
So it doesn’t really answer my question… how did you arrive to that conclusion “more than resonate” since it seems Woopra didn’t help you much in that?
Well, for one, Woopra does still do some cool things. If, for example, I have an intense visitor – someone who visits a lot of pages in a visit or a day, I get a little e-mail from Woopra telling me so (and telling me, roughly, where in the world the person is). And Google Analytics can do the same – I can see, for example, that today, I had two visits from El Paso, TX, and that between the two visits, 81 pages were visited. And that someone in Tonwanda visited 20 pages.
I can’t tell when YOU visit any longer, thanks to Woopra’s pullback, but I sort of can, if I have a sense of where you live (and you don’t live in, say, New York, where your viewership is far harder to discern among the multiplicity of visitors).
well, NOW I have my answer… thank you!
You can stalk me 😉 I won’t charge you $40.