Nedstat

» see nedstat.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

nedstat was dutch at the marketing layer and never reached turkey at scale. it was the european cousin of sitemeter, founded in early 1996 in amsterdam by michiel berger after he wanted a way to count visits to sites hosted somewhere other than his own server. with the entrepreneur hans veldhuizen as partner, he turned the script into a hosted service that any webmaster could paste into a footer.

the model was the same as the american web counters that filled the same hole. you signed up for a free account, you embedded a one-line snippet, you got back a tiny counter image plus a dashboard with referrers and browser stats. the european win for nedstat was that the dashboards were translated, the legal terms were eu-readable, and the support did not assume you were in pacific time. by 2004 the company had ten thousand business customers paying for nedstat pro and sitestat, plus 750,000 free accounts. nedstat's crawlers were tracking 90 million pageviews a day across europe.

in july 2005 nedstat sold the free-counter brand to the german ad-tech firm ad pepper media for €3 million. ad pepper renamed it webstats4u and pushed popup advertising onto every free counter, which destroyed the brand inside the user base within a year. ad pepper renamed it again to motigo in march 2007 to try to clean up. nedstat kept the paid sitestat business and pivoted into corporate analytics. comscore acquired the whole company on 1 september 2010 for €29 million, and the nedstat name was sunset inside the comscore brand stack soon after.

~ the dossier ~

~ what the counter looked like ~

the public-facing piece of nedstat was a small rectangular image. depending on the year and the tier, it carried a counter number, a small dutch flag, or a corporate badge. you saw it on the bottom-left of a personal page or in the sidebar of a small business site. the dashboard behind it had your referrer log, top searches, browser breakdown, country breakdown, plus a daily and weekly chart. for a one-person blog in 1999 this was extraordinary, the same way the geocities visitor count had been extraordinary in 1997.

turkish blogs of that 2002-2008 era mostly ran sitemeter or homegrown php counters when they wanted a public number. nedstat was visible enough in the european scene that you would meet it on a dutch or german or scandinavian site if you clicked around, but it did not have a turkish-language marketing push, so it never settled into the local stack the way other widgets did.

~ the rename loop ~

the july 2005 ad pepper sale is where the consumer brand actually died, even if the formal sunset waited five more years. webstats4u was instantly disliked because the popup ads broke the implicit deal of a free counter. when ad pepper renamed it motigo in 2007 the damage was already locked in. by then statcounter and google analytics had eaten the small-site tier from below.

the nedstat brand that survived after the consumer split was the corporate one. sitestat was used by dutch government sites and by major european broadcasters for years. that part of the business is what comscore actually wanted in 2010. the €29 million purchase price was for the dutch government and broadcasting contracts. the small homepages where nedstat had started had already moved on.

~ what it left ~

nedstat left behind one of the cleanest examples of a pre-google-analytics web. the assumption used to be that you placed a small piece of someone else's javascript or image on your site, you got a daily dashboard, and a public-visible counter was part of the implicit deal. google analytics shifted that whole arrangement to invisible tracking with no public counter, and the counter widget category as a public artifact died with it.

michiel berger went on to other dutch tech ventures. the original blue or red counter graphic survives in the wayback archive on thousands of personal pages from the early 2000s, frozen at the visit count of whatever day the site was last edited. dutch web history rests pretty heavily on that single small image.

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