Blogbeat Comes Out of Beta
For the past couple months, I've been using Blogbeat - a new blog statistics/analytics service. It has been interesting to see the company - led by Jeff Turner - evolve the service with a new look and feel. Not surprisingly, there have been a few hiccups along the way but new users will now find it a very useful tool for bloggers interested in slicing and dicing their traffic in different ways. The big challenge for Blogbeat is getting people to pay for the service - $5 a month or $50 a year - given so many Web 2.0 services are free - probably because they haven't stumbled across a viable business model yet. As for how Blogbeat compares with other services, it's cleaner and more accessible than Google Analytics, which is really geared to people looking to jump-start their AdSense revenue. I have only been only to use the links tool within MeasureMap because the service doesn't support Blogware yet. That said, Blogbeat is easier to use than MeasureMap because all you need to do is drop a small piece of Java script on your blog - rather than having to place code into your footer, comments and post components. I've also tried StatCounter, which is fairly good, although its interface is too busy. So is it worth paying for Blogbeat? For $5 a month, it's a good deal for anyone interested in their traffic - and we all know bloggers are curious about traffic even if they don't admit it.
Update: SolutionWatch has an extensive and positive review on Blogbeat.
