Google Analytics is free to anyone w/ less than 5 million pageviews per month [1]. After that you supposedly just have to create a spoof adsense account without showing any Google ads and you can use Analytics [2]. Apparantly this is really true, too, because according to OSTG, Slashdot's parent company, they are getting > 85 million pageviews per month [3], and they are using Google Analytics [4].

In other words, Google is blowing a ton of money on bandwidth and cpu to provide /., or literally, /anyone/, including the BBC or Microsoft if they wanted to. On the flip side, they get to look at all of Slashdot's customers.

I'd absolutely love it if CmdrTaco added my Gmail account to the list of authorized viewers of /.'s GA data.

[1] http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?answer=26784&topic=7184
[2] http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/google-analytics/
[3] http://www.ostg.com/sites/it_focus.htm
[4] script src="http://www.google-analytics.com/urchin.js" /script
script type="text/javascript"
_uacct = "UA-32013-5";
_udn = "slashdot.org";
urchinTracker();
/script