> The UTM, or Urchin Traffic Monitor, was an early method for augmenting Apache (or IIS, etc.) log files with cookies, such that unique visitors could be established.

Of course, “utm” lives on today as a standard prefix for link tracking parameters, even outside of google analytics

I can't really explain how cool Urchin was. I think it was one of the first truly analytical software I used — not just from a web traffic point of view, but it was a site that used and presented data. The graphs, the maps, even the two-column UI was stuff a lot of web developers copied and riffed on back then. It really opened my mind up to a lot of things: design, software as a service (and installable software), even acquisitions in general. Strangely had a large impact on my future career.

I'm very surprised that they signed up whole ISPs and got away with it.

I wasn't able to process the daily logs of the tracking pixel of the site I was operating on Urchin 5 within 24 hours. I had a beefy server with a 16 drive raid array but the log processing never used multiple cores.

By that time Google had aquired them, support didn't exist because they wanted you to switch to Google Analytics and it was basically 30k down the drain.

I loved this retell. Brings back the old days, especially the Google and Yahoo parties of the late 2000's. Those were crazy. They literally carried one of my employees out of a basement rave who had passed out from drinking too much.

I was so excited to switch from Webtrends to Urchin and back when I still loved Google I was delighted that they bought it out and made it free. Now I wish Google had never touched them.

> Our first tradeshow ever, circa 1997.

Pardon my one nitpick: the computer in the photo (PowerMac1,1) was introduced 1999-01-05.

That picture of their first computer, a sparcstation, brought back memories.

Our first computer at Cygnus was a sparcstation that was actually a “prototype” (probably PVT since it had all the housing etc) for the first sparcstation. I think Andy B had given it to John. It worked fine and lasted for years.

When the author said they’d started the company on a 10K investment I knew they were my kind of people.

Worked at a hosting company in those years.. urchin was the GOAT. we ran it for every customer, and relied on it heavily for billing our customers. It was crazy fast and elegant. Nothing came close

Urchin is not Google advertising's only origin story...

See also "A Brief History of NetGravity":

In October 1999, DoubleClick purchased NetGravity in a stock deal valued at $530m. The NetGravity product line is now completely incorporated into the DoubleClick portfolio of advertising management products. The original founders and management team have all left to pursue new opportunities. NetGravity, having helped to create the multi-billion dollar internet advertising market, has essentially ceased to exist.

-- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41206733

DoubleClick rebranded NetGravity AdServer as DART Enterprise... On March 11, 2008, Google acquired DoubleClick for $3.1 billion. In June 2018, Google announced plans to rebrand its ads platforms, and DoubleClick was merged into the new Google Marketing Platform brand.

-- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DoubleClick

So have a good idea, be lucky and smart, and most importantly come from really rich families because floating 2.8million through two (!!?) crashes on an obvious now technology but log processing in the early 2000s is like describing how to win powerball.

Urchin analytics (which, IIRC, were provided to us by our host OVH for free at the time) is what taught me what I would still call Rule #1 of being a webmaster:

> Tracking your analytics makes traffic grow. Refreshing your analytics makes traffic stall.

Discussed at the time (of the article):

The origin story of Google Analytics - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12986649 - Nov 2016 (53 comments)

What about defunct startup shirts? Like, I’d wear that Urchin shirt.

UA to GA4 finally got us to abandon google analytics for cookie free cloudflare completing the cycle

Love reading stories like this! Thank you.

I DO know about Yellow Dog Linux as it was the Linux officially supported on a PS3 console!

Personal story: in 2006 in Google Enterprise, we had many, many meetings with the GA team, the goal being a private, inside-the-firewall box that would run GA, using our Google Search Appliance hardware.

This never came to anything.

We were Urchin users prior to the acquisition and were also Google AdWords customers...

I remember being shocked at the idea of putting Google's JavaScript in our secure e-commerce site. We wanted to pay as little as possible for traffic and were mining the long tail of keywords. We certainly did not want AdWords to know what our economics were.

Ultimately AdWords evolved into a very efficient system that groups similar keywords and takes as much margin as the advertisers can handle. The golden days of a level playing field in ppc advertising were over and Google won the game :)

The fact ga4 doesn't even do what urchin did back when Google bought it tells you everything you need to know about how great this software (and company) truly was.

Hmm. So this is the ancestor of stuff I block with my pihole now?

Had a chance to meet Brett at the Google offices shortly after the acquisition. Really nice guy, had a lot of good advice about being a founder.

I remember switching from some cgi script web counter to urchin and it was incredible the insights it unlocked. Good nostalgia hit.

(2016)

(In case anyone else is surprised by the line in the article that the “10th anniversary of the acquisition has recently passed.”)

I think a lot of people forget some of the other Google origin stories.

Android was a company Google acquired.

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Wow- a lot of similarity to what's important with analytics today! Depth of analytics and speed of queries were their key competitive differentiators. Those are still ones we hammer at Amplitude. Also individual visitor history drill-down (we call it user timelines) is one of the most used features in Amplitude today.

I have a huge amount of respect for the Urchin team. They had to figure out everything for the first time on their own with nothing to go off of while going after a much smaller and earlier market.

Oh, that domain I block. I still have no idea what they actually do, but they sound really scary.