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Fewer people remember that Google Analytics used to be a paid tool called Urchin.

Google acquired Urchin Software Corporation in 2005 and released Google Analytics for free. It was a shock. The world had been paying several hundred dollars a month for web analytics. Overnight, that cost dropped to zero. Competitors were annihilated. You cannot compete with free. For Google, the measurement data itself was the prize. If you sell ads, nothing is more valuable than traffic data from every website on earth.

The Universal Analytics era lasted a long time. A session-based model. Everything revolved around pageviews. The official limit was ten million hits per property per month. In practice, exceeding that limit did not stop data collection. It just triggered sampling. Plenty of sites ran tens of millions of hits on the free tier. Google chose not to enforce the cap. More data served their interests.

The forced migration to GA4 was brutal. Session-based to event-based. The measurement model changed at its foundation. Historical data could not be carried over. Years of trend data, severed. The backend moved to BigQuery, which meant raw data became queryable with SQL. An improvement. But in exchange, the UI became impenetrable.

We use the tool for free, so we have no standing to complain. Still, the fact that one company controls the measurement infrastructure for most of the world's websites is worth stopping to think about once in a while. When the platform changes, the definition of measurement changes with it. Our numbers are shaped by Google's convenience.