WebSideStory

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

~ the obit ~

i missed websidestory by category. the consumer counters i actually saw on the bottom of geocities and angelfire pages were sitemeter and bravenet and extreme tracking, the little gif badges that showed how many people had visited. websidestory was selling something else, to people who were not running a personal page. it was the enterprise tier, the package that came with a contract and an account manager. its consumer-tier brand was a thing called hitbox.

blaise barrelet incorporated websidestory in san diego on september 10 1996, six months before google was a company. the timing was the whole point. the commercial web was three years in, every brand with a website needed numbers to put in a quarterly report, and there was no standard analytics tool yet. webtrends and websidestory ran neck and neck through the late nineties as the two enterprise web counters of choice. urchin came later, omniture came later, google analytics did not exist until 2005.

hitbox was the consumer face. you signed up for a free account, dropped a one-line javascript snippet on your site, and the websidestory backend served you visitor stats with a little hitbox badge linking back. by 2001 hitbox counters were running on hundreds of thousands of sites. the deal was the same as sitemeter and statcounter, you got the stats and websidestory got an aggregate map of internet traffic patterns. that aggregate was the actual product.

i was on a 33.6k modem in ankara in 1999, and the sites i ran were small enough that nedstat was fine. websidestory's hitbox showed up on the bigger sites i visited. the badge was a familiar small graphic at the bottom of corporate pages. i never opened an account. by the time i would have been the customer they wanted, in say 2006, websidestory had rebranded into visual sciences and the brand i recognized was gone.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what it was ~

the product split was load-bearing for the business. in those days. hitbox free was the demand-generation funnel and the aggregate data layer. hbx analytics, later just hbx, was the contract. hbx tracked everything an enterprise wanted to know about a checkout flow or a campaign landing page in 2003. websidestory took the company public on nasdaq in 2004 at a market cap that briefly cleared half a billion dollars.

the acquisition that ended the company name happened in two steps. websidestory bought visual sciences in 2006 for fifty-seven million dollars, then in 2007 adopted the visual sciences name across the whole company in a strategic shift toward enterprise. the websidestory brand and the hitbox brand were retired together. in october 2007 omniture signed a definitive agreement to buy visual sciences for around three hundred ninety-four million dollars. the deal closed on january 17 2008.

~ what got buried with it ~

adobe bought omniture in 2009 for one point eight billion dollars and rolled the entire stack into adobe marketing cloud, later renamed adobe experience cloud. by 2014 there was no product anywhere in adobe's lineup that traced its lineage back to websidestory by name. the hbx engineering team had been absorbed twice over. hitbox the consumer counter was killed off in the early omniture period. really though, what survived in adobe was a column of customer relationships that traced back to those 1999 webtrends-versus-websidestory enterprise contracts.

google analytics shipped in november 2005 and was free, which collapsed the consumer counter market over the next three years. sitemeter, nedstat, extreme tracking, statcounter and the rest of the hitbox-tier counter sites all died or shrank into legacy modes. the enterprise tier survived inside omniture and adobe because contracts and integrations move slowly. but the name websidestory ended on the day the omniture deal closed.

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