[dangrossman]

W3Counter's more fun. It's bright, colorful, nothing's buried multiple menus deep. Whole classrooms sign up for it every year while learning to build webpages. It gives your site a hit counter so you can watch the visit count go up every time someone new checks out your site. You can "spy" on those new visitors, seeing where they came from, watch them move page-to-page, stuff GA doesn't do with its aggregate-level batch-updated reporting. New site owners love that stuff. I also first created it years before Google bought Urchin and made GA.

[bhayden]

Unless I'm misunderstanding, I am fairly certain GA does everything you just describe. They have a real-time menu option and I can see my users going from page to page. I can see the number of people on my website right now (21).

I guess the bottom line is your platform is much more approachable and easier to understand. Thanks for the response.

[dangrossman]

Following individual users around (something W3Counter lets you do) is fundamentally different than a real-time aggregate dashboard of the same users (something both sites have). A dashboard is interesting to a business. Friend-watching is interesting to ordinary people. "Oh, I just got a new visitor from Facebook in Camden. I have a friend in Camden, that's probably Jessica! I wonder what she's looking at? Oh, she just opened the guestbook page and has started writing something!" is fun for someone running their first blog.

[bhayden]

Thanks for the responses, this sounds cheesy but you're an inspiration for the goals that I'm working towards right now (making SaaS products for small businesses). I will start working on it full time in about 4 months (with ~2 years of living expenses saved up). You give me hope that it's not just a pipe dream :)