Tracking-free audience statistics - Bert Hubert's writings
a day ago
- The author criticizes surveillance capitalism and the prevalence of third-party tracking on websites, including their own sites.
- Many websites use Google Analytics, sharing visitor data with Google, but the insights are often not actionable and come with privacy costs like GDPR cookie warnings.
- Content creators need to know if articles are actually read and how far readers progress, which most analytics platforms do not provide.
- The author developed audience-minutes.js, an open-source script that samples reading minutes and scroll depth without tracking, cookies, or third-party services.
- The script generates density graphs showing where readers spend time, helping authors understand engagement and article length effectiveness.
- The solution demonstrates that useful audience statistics can be gathered without compromising user privacy.