Normally I wouldn’t mention a press release citing a company landing a customer, but yesterday WebSideStory announced it signed up Knight-Ridder.

I know the Knight-Ridder Digital sites well – they were a long time Accrue customer, first through the “renegade” San Jose Mercury News, then all the K-R properties, and then on to Classified Ventures. These days, it seems like AccrueDatanautics has taken its eye off the web analytics ball. The only customer-related press release they’ve had since inception of the company is a nearly year-old announcement that a customer renewed their support agreement. It’s no wonder that other vendors are stepping in.

Anyway — kudos to WebSideStory.

Not sure what to make of some of the numbers in Media Life’s article Long slow win over illegal downloads. Numbers from ComScore show about 19.5 million visits to the top five P2P sites (a huge drop), versus 26.44 million visits to the top 10 retail music sites (a modest increase).

That’s big news. But to conclude that the RIAA lawsuits and easy access to legal music has stemmed the tide in music piracy is a bit premature. What you can conclude is this:

ComScore shows about 19.5 million visits to the top five P2P sites (a huge drop), versus 26.44 million visits to the top 10 retail music sites (a modest increase).

ComScore measured more visits to the top 10 retail music sites than to the top five P2P sites, and I’m sure to the RIAA, that’s better than the alternative. But that’s all you can conclude. P2P is happening outside the top five sites. There are web sites – often outside the US – devoted to illegal music sharing. There’s Usenet’s alt.binaries heirarchy. And of course, there’s BitTorrent, which by many estimates is consuming huge amounts of bandwidth. (There are more than 10 music retailers, too.)

Some of the numbers are odd though. It lists Barnes & Noble as the #1 destination for retail music, and doesn’t have Amazon in the top 10. That sounds strange.

In the same article, Nielsen//NetRatings is quoted with lots of numbers about the top 25 web sites, top 25 advertisers, top 25 advertising sites, etc — I won’t go into details here, but check it out. For many readers of this blog, those tables will be more interesting.

Some happenings in the web analytics industry that caught my eye today:

Omniture announced a new line of executive chairs that have built-in LCDs. This could be just the thing for busy folks to keep tabs on their site stats. The new division, Omni Furniture, has promised additional pieces in the future.

Urchin Software announced a special vertical release for banking and financial services firms. The software, Street Urchin, looks a little rough around the edges by design – apparently that “grimy feel” is playing well with the pinstripe set.

I just heard Apple has been grumbling about Coremetrics. Apparently Apple doesn’t like the use of the term “core”. The Beatles record company, Apple Corps, is not amused by Apple’s attitude. Can’t we all just get along?

Speaking of music, Visual Sciences are rumored to be changing their name to AV Sciences as they add what they call “symphonic analytics” to their lineup. Sounds interesting – ha ha!

Finally, I’m pleased to announce that Omniture CTO Brett Error and I are joining forces on a new part-time consultancy, Error Page Analytics.

Over at Coffee, Sun & Analytics, Xavier has a couple posts on session length. Some good thoughts there, but I was surprised at the statement

Session length = number of pages users viewed during their session on the site.

Call me old school, but I thought session length was the amount of time a user spent.

I can’t find any definitive phrase for what Xavier is talking about. At Accrue we called it Session Depth or Visit Depth (we said a session was user-centric: a user may visit many sites during a session). At Yahoo there’s no new term, it’s just “pageviews per session.”

Argh. Here we have two people with a lot of experience in web analytics and we’re not even speaking the same language. What a mess!

In other news, Google announced that they acquired Urchin, a web analytics vendor and service. This makes a lot of sense for Google, but not for some of the reasons I’ve seen speculated on.

One speculation is that it gives Google web analytics capabilities to analyze their site. Actually, no, it doesn’t. Google has too much traffic, and their analysis needs are too complex.

Another is that Google can now offer this as an additional capability to their AdWords / AdSense customers. I don’t buy this. Google’s already got enough reporting capabilities in the SEM (search engine marketing) area, and Urchin isn’t going to add any value here that couldn’t have been done cheaper in-house.

It’s also not because Google is just a bunch of Nice People and they want to have another tool in their portfolio of cool stuff.

So if Google doesn’t need this for their own analytics, or to offer to AdWords customers, why bother? After all, Urchin isn’t a game-changing technology. There are better solutions available, no matter which axis you measure on.

Simple. Google did this because they want more ability to get off-network surfing data. They want to know, for people not using any Google services, what are they using? That information is partially available through AdSense, because AdSense lives on third-party sites. That’s a rich source of data. A nice way to get even more off-network data is to supply folks with a hosted analytics service that most small and medium-sized web sites can use. Simply put a web bug / beacon in your page, and we’ll track your visitors for you. And for us.

(Before you get all cynical on me: yes, Overture bought Keylime many years ago, for SEM reporting, and perhaps for off-network information, I don’t know. The difference between the Overture/Keylime and Google/Urchin deals is that Yahoo! and Overture are different legal entities, and have different privacy policies. As a result, Yahoo and Overture cannot share third-party information about web surfers. Whether or not that makes business sense is beside the point – Yahoo’s pretty rabid about privacy.)

One final element of this announcement. If there’s no privacy backlash, and web sites brush off the concept of Google as big brother, the low-end market for web analytics is effectively dead. Omniture, WebSideStory and (perhaps) CoreMetrics will survive, but it’s going to be tough for anyone else, which is going to give the newly independent WebTrends second thoughts about resurrecting WebTrends Live / WebTrends OnDemand.