In today’s attention economy, media organisations must fight to survive under the crushing weight of the dominant platforms. Digital analytics data is the key: it holds vital insights into your audience, content, monetisation and retention, and empowers you to optimise results in each of these areas. When accessed and used effectively across your organisation, digital analytics data can generate exponential value and unlock new opportunities.
We launched XiTi in 2000 without any real business model and with the vague hope of being paid via advertising. Since then we’ve worked through countless challenges—the biggest being the arrival of Google Analytics in 2005. True to its model, Google started by crushing the free market by imposing its solution through almost unlimited marketing power. After tearing down the free market and wiping out most of the paid solutions, it has finally positioned itself as a more expensive “pro” solution. A classic scorched earth technique as seen with Google Maps or more recently with Google Suite.
Against this backdrop, XiTi (formerly AT Internet and now Piano Analytics) has survived, and even grown stronger internationally over the last 17 years. This has been down to a two-fold approach: We offer high-end solutions with superior data quality (no sampling, scalability, power and granularity, SLAs, real time etc.) We are exemplary in terms of privacy by design (purpose, control, security, ownership). In this context, we have done everything to keep XiTi free and open, in order to have an alternative to Google Analytics, even if the solution has been a financial burden for the last 15 years. Unfortunately, for technical reasons, we can no longer maintain this service which we value so much. Our platform has evolved to meet security requirements and the progress of legislation, and XiTi Free will soon no longer be able to support this.
Excellent free alternatives to Google Analytics have also taken over, much more functionally relevant than the old lady that XiTi has become after all these years in maintenance mode. Before a storm or a software update crashes everything, we need to get ahead of it. As far as simple (in the good sense of the word), privacy-friendly, and free alternatives are concerned: take a look at the solutions recommended by the CNIL. We already closed the subscription to XiTi Free a few months ago, and the official end of data collection and processing will take place—with a few waves of nostalgia—on March 31, 2023. If you would like to continue using our professional solutions, please contact us directly and we will be able to offer you the most appropriate solutions. We’ve been very proud to have been of service to you for the last 22 years, and to have held out against the destructive force of Big G for so long. It’s been a great ride, full of chaotic uploads, DDoS attacks that left us more than a little confused, servers falling off the table, and esoteric questions to Support. Back in the day (before GA), that famous red and yellow logo (admittedly aesthetically challenged, but at least it was highly visible) was displayed three billion times a month and allowed us to launch our service with a marketing budget slightly lower than that of a bakery. Nobody suspected that the solution was developed in Gironde and the VCs had a good laugh when we told them that we were going to position ourselves at the very high end of the market to compete not with Google but with Adobe.