SpyLOG

» see spylog.ru as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

I never saw a SpyLOG badge, because I did not read Russian pages and Turkish ones carried different logos doing the same job. That is the only distance worth declaring here, and it is a thin one, because the object is universal. Somewhere near the bottom of a page, under the last link, a small rectangular graphic with a number in it. You put it there yourself. It was the only way to find out whether anyone had come.

SpyLOG opened its tracker in November 1999, built by a Moscow company called ZAO Sovremennye Internet-tekhnologii. You registered your site, you got a snippet of code, you pasted the counter into your template, and in return you got somewhere around seventy kinds of report about who had loaded the page. There was a directory of participating sites and a ranking built off the same numbers, and for a while a moderation team under Vladimir Kalachikhin deciding what belonged in which category.

By the summer of 2000 more than fifty thousand sites were registered. On 16 July 2001 the service went commercial: the full reporting stayed behind a payment, and anyone who did not pay kept a thin slice of statistics over a short window. That was a standard move for the era and it worked, because the counter was already in the page and taking it out meant editing every template you owned.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what it actually sold ~

Under the free badge was a real analytics business with a product line that kept growing. Tracker was the counter. Filter sorted traffic. Research did sector studies, offered from April 2001 onward, and Monitor arrived in May 2002 as a market-watching package for companies who wanted to know what their competitors' sites were doing. Trends came later.

In November 2004 the company restructured its pricing into Business, Premium and Lite, and alongside them put out a free tier called Solidarnost, meaning solidarity, aimed at nonprofits and personal homepages. Charging the companies and carrying the hobbyists is how a measurement service keeps the coverage that makes its numbers worth buying in the first place.

~ the census ~

The interesting output was never the individual site report. From the summer of 2000 SpyLOG ran a project called Global Statistics, which took the aggregate of every counter it had deployed and published what that added up to: how many people were on the Russian-language internet, where in the country they were, which browsers and operating systems they ran, what screen resolutions they had, and which search engine they arrived from.

For most of the 2000s that was the closest thing Runet had to a population count, and it existed because tens of thousands of webmasters had voluntarily installed a measuring instrument in exchange for a vanity number. Every national web of that decade had one of these accidental statistics agencies. Almost none of them survived the arrival of a free one from Mountain View.

~ the handover ~

The founder was gone long before the company was. Andrey Andreev, born Andrey Ogandzhanyants, built SpyLOG in 1999 and left it in January 2002. He started Begun that year, Mamba in 2005 and Badoo in 2006, moved to London, and turned up on the Forbes list in 2018 at about one and a half billion dollars. Alexey Basov ran SpyLOG for a stretch too and went with him to Begun. Fyodor Virin took over afterward.

On 10 August 2007 the company was sold to the Aktivist group, owners of the hosting provider MasterHost. Google Analytics had gone free the previous year and the floor was already falling out of paid web measurement. In April 2010 SpyLOG stopped existing as a service, and what changed hands was the web-analytics products and the customer list, which went to Openstat. The counters kept rendering for a while in the footers of pages nobody had edited since 2004, counting for an office that had closed.

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