Web Masters

Scott Crosby, co-founder of Urchin Software Corporation -- the company that would become Google Analytics -- tells the story of how he helped revolutionize the website stats tracking industry.

Show Notes

Google Analytics has been such an important and well-integrated part of the Google suite of services for so long that most people assume it was developed inside Google. But that’s not the case.

Google Analytics actually began as part of a San Diego web consulting firm from the mid-90s called Quantified Systems Inc. Quantified Systems was really just a group of guys building one-off websites for clients around Southern California and hosting those sites on their internal servers.

At the time, bandwidth was incredibly expensive, and some of their more prominent customers were running up bills worth thousands of dollars a month. To help manage these costs and charge their customers appropriately, the Quantified Systems team built a custom web stats platform to show how much traffic a site was getting and where it was coming from based on server logs.

They soon realized that their Web stats program had the potential to be a more interesting business than their Web consultancy. So they gave away their clients and changed their name to Urchin Software Corporation. Their website stats tracking tool was so successful that Google bought them and used them as the foundation to launch Google Analytics.

For a complete transcript of the episode, click here.

What is Web Masters?

Web Masters is an original podcast that explores the history of the Internet through the stories of some of its most important innovators. In each episode, host Aaron Dinin, a serial entrepreneur and digital media scholar, talks with Internet entrepreneurs who created important websites, tools, services, and features. Some are hugely popular, some you’ve never heard of, and all of them have impacted everything you do online. You’ll get a behind-the-scenes look at how the Internet has enabled -- and continues to create -- some of the greatest business opportunities in history from the people who have proven they know how to build successful Internet businesses.