A VC in Vacationland

A web analytics train wreck is expected later this year, when an old version
of Google Analytics—still being used by a huge number of web sites—gets
phased out, according to a report issued Wednesday (April 8) from Pingdom. The
report was a
survey that looked at the top 10,000 Web sites and it discovered two
interesting figures: 50 percent of all of those sites use Google Analytics,
which in and of itself is fairly mind-blowing; and a full 40 percent of those
sites are using an expired version of Google Analytics.

“Google switched its development over to ga.js well over a year ago. It’s
truly remarkable that almost half of the sites using Google Analytics have yet
to migrate to the new ga.js script,” the report said. “The question is, for how
long will urchin.js keep working? Back when Google made the switch it was widely
believed that Google would stop supporting the old script after 12-18 months. If
that is the case, the end for urchin.js is getting near.” The report speculated
that “urchin.js will be decommissioned sometime this summer” and, when that
switchover happens, all of the sites using the older version will “start
returning a 404 error (file not found) and therefore stop registering traffic.”

With thanks to Evan Schuman of storefrontbacktalk for authoring this post
April 8th, 2009

Note: Google has since issued a statement that the end of urchin.js is not imminent, but will happen sooner rather than later.  Google says plenty of advance notice will be given, although such announcements are unlikely to make the 6PM news.