SiteMeter

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

~ the obituary ~

SiteMeter started in 1996 as a free web-counter and visitor-statistics service from David Smith. You pasted a small block of HTML into your page footer, and SiteMeter rendered a colored bar that displayed your visit count, plus a dashboard you could open to see referrers, browsers, and rough geographic distribution. There was a free tier with low limits and a paid tier with more retention.

For the entire 2003 to 2010 stretch, that small colored bar was on a very large share of the public web. Blogger blogs, TypePad blogs, MovableType installs, personal homepages, small church sites, school sites, the kind of one-person publication that did not yet have a logging server and could not be bothered to set one up. SiteMeter was free, embeddable, and gave a blogger something to feel quietly proud about when the visit count rolled past a number that felt round.

In 2014, users started reporting that the SiteMeter widget was redirecting visitors to ad pages and dropping cookies on third-party domains. The forum and blog response was instant. A wave of posts titled "Goodbye SiteMeter" appeared, longtime users replaced the widget with StatCounter or Google Analytics, and the user base bled out over months. The service kept running for several more years in a degraded state but never recovered its place in the blog-template default stack. By 2018 the brand had effectively gone dormant. The domain still resolves in 2026 but the company behind it has not produced new product news in a long time.

~ the case file ~

~ how it landed in turkey ~

SiteMeter showed up on turkish blogs around 2005, when Blogger was the default platform for amateur writing in turkish. on Donanim Haber and similar forums i hung around in the early 2000s, the equivalent of SiteMeter was usually a php hit counter script you ran on your own host. i used a couple of those for my forum signature graphics, never sitemeter directly, because by the time i had my own site i was already running awstats against apache logs.

but the visual memory is sharp. every blogger.com template you opened had a SiteMeter or StatCounter bar in the right sidebar with two or three numbers and a colored block. it was the badge that signaled "this blog has at least one reader, including the author". it was useful in the same way the early "you are visitor #4827" GIF counter on geocities had been useful in 1998, just packaged for the 2005 self-hosted blog.

~ the slide ~

the 2014 malware controversy was not the only crack but it was the loud one. for years before that, Google Analytics had been quietly winning the analytics market. it was free, it ran from a serious company, it did not show a public bar on your site, and the dashboard was much better. SiteMeter's value proposition had always partly been the public visibility of the counter, which mattered in 2004 when a blog wanted to flex. by 2012 that flex was gone. nobody wanted a public counter on their site anymore.

so SiteMeter had already been losing users on substance when the ad-redirect issue hit in june 2014. the response was so fast because the only people still embedding the widget by then were people who had not touched their template in years. once those people noticed the redirects, the cleanup was a single template edit and the visit was over.

~ the long tail ~

SiteMeter's domain still resolves in 2026, with a thin landing page and no obvious activity. there is no formal shutdown announcement. that absence is the entire ending. an embedded-widget service does not need to issue a press release to die. it just stops being included in new templates, then existing users notice the script is broken or harmful, then they pull the snippet, and one day there is no SiteMeter on any page that anyone visits. that day arrived around 2017 or 2018 depending on whose template you were watching. the brand survived in a sleep-state long after the product had any users left.

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