Dublin-born Aodhan Cullen, founder of Irish headquartered StatCounter, has been named Business Week’s Young European Entrepreneur of 2007. His StatCounter business, which provides free traffic statistics to member web sites, was founded in 1999 and is one of the most visited sites in the US, ahead of household names like Apple, Adobe, Dell and Expedia.com. StatCounter provides a free service which allows its 1.4m members to monitor the number of visits to their websites. It also tracks the geographical location of visitors; the various pages a visitor views and the keywords they used to find the site, along with other data.
Cullen, now 24, started the business when he was just 16. Growth really took off from 2003 and StatCounter now draws around 1,500 new members each day. It currently tracks over 9 billion pageloads per month across its network of over 2 million web sites. In the last month StatCounter set up headquarters under the Dublin Business Innovation Centre (DBIC) umbrella in the Guinness Enterprise Centre in Dublin where it has just added 80 powerful servers. It currently employs six people.
Businessweek.com reports that the global web analytics market is growing rapidly in the aftermath of the dotcom boom. Bill Gassman, a research director specialising in web analytics at tech consultancy, Gartner says that the $400m market is ‘exploding again’ and could more than double in size by next year.
StatCounter doesn’t compete head on with with Omniture or the other high end player in web analytics such as WebTrends that target multinationals and big corporations. Rather, its customers are small and medium sized firms that don’t need highly sophisticated analytical tools – and can’t afford to spend thousands of Euro on them.
“I would like to thank Businessweek and those who selected me,” commented Aodhan Cullen. “This is not really an award for me but recognises our members who have helped us to build one of the most popular web analytical services and web sites in the world.”
Cullen, who graduated from DCU in 2004, has always been interested in running a business. When he was just 12 he set up a business typing CVs. He then got into developing web sites for paying clients, and it was from this that the idea for StatCounter was born. “Clients kept saying to me ‘the site is great Aodhan, but is anyone actually visiting it?’” he explained. These experiences sowed the seeds that caused him to develop StatCounter. He need have no worries about his own web site on that score. StatCounter has now reached the Holy Grail in terms of web sites in that it is ranked as a Google PageRank 9/10 site. Google PageRank, developed by Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, is the number of points out of ten that signifies the importance of a site to Google – 10 being the most popular and 0 the least. PageRank 9/10 sites include Google itself, Microsoft, Apple, Adobe, Cisco, NASA and the White House.
As well as its existing free summary lifetime statistics, StatCounter recently extended the detailed drill down information which users can use to track visitors from the last 100 logs to the last 500. Members can upgrade from www.statcounter.com’s free service to more detailed reports for €7 per month.
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