sneaky free statistics by webstats4u - formerly nedstats
Wednesday, 22 November 2006 20:24 pm
I had a couple of complaints from people that emailed me and claimed my site generated pop-up ads to them…
That was really surprising to me but I’ve now found out the source of it. And boy does this make me angry!
I’ve used a free web statistics service for a long time already - called Nedstat. Apparently Nedstat was taken over by Webstat4u at some point, and it now turns out that this company has also made some nasty, scary and shocking changes to the way they let you use their “free” service.
Here is the relevant excerpt from the current general terms and conditions:
webstats4U is a 100% FREE version for all webmasters. In order to finance the maintenance, hosting, new developments and to continue providing you with the world’s best FREE web analytics tool in the market, webstats4U will accept advertising sponsorships. These conditions are stated in our Terms of Use (http://www.webstats4u.com/terms/) and have also been communicated in on the front page of the reporting site as well as in our newsletters to all webmasters in August and September 2005.
These advertising sponsorships can appear as a pop-up or pop-under advertisement or slide-in flash format, and will at no point be implemented directly into your website as banners, buttons, links or similar.
We will keep sponsorships at a reasonable level by using frequency capping and always bear the user experience in mind by serving campaigns maintaining a code of conduct relating to the types of advertising we will accept. This means that users will not be exposed to the same ad many times and, importantly that no-one gets bombarded with ads.
Advertising is hosted and launched from webstats4U servers and will thereby not effect the performance of the individual website on which the user is surfing. It is our intention to provide the best experiences for websites, advertisers and end-users in our webstats4U network and for the web measurement service.
Scary isn’t it? Needless to say I was never updated on this small change in the terms and conditions - so I found out only recently.
I’ve dropped this service and the pop-up ads are history.
I now use my own webstat application which comes with my web hosting provider.
Webstats4u are sneaky weasels!