Yesterday Nedstat, European leader in website analytics, announced in a press release that it “has sold the activities of its free website analytics solution Nedstat Basic to ad pepper media. Ad pepper is a leading interactive and direct marketing solutions and services provider that is headquartered in Nuremberg, Germany. The sale of Nedstat Basic allows Nedstat to focus on the expansion of its advanced website analytics products.
The transaction price consists of Euro 3 million in cash plus a limited earn-out component. This significantly strengthens Nedstat's equity and cash position.
Nedstat Basic was Nedstat's first product when the company started in 1996. The free service has always been popular with homepage owners. Throughout the years its functionality and usability have been continuously improved and the number of users has consistently grown. Today, Nedstat Basic is actively used by more than 600,000 homepage owners on more than 1 million non-commercial websites around the world.
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Ad pepper media has ambitious plans to develop Nedstat Basic further into a next generation solution. It intends to rebrand Nedstat Basic and focus on ongoing technology and feature enhancements for the users”.
Nedstat is a Dutch company by origin which has grown very fast. I remember that I visited them in their early days in Amsterdam, where they had their offices; nothing fancy at that time. They had just started out with Nedstat Basic. And as usual everyone with a personal site wanted to have the free counter. Now they claim that 600.000 homepage owners use it on 1 million non-commercial websites. Which might be or not be true. The question is however: how many ghost users do they have. I just checked the site with my array of passwords and noticed that I have at least 4 accounts as homepage owners. And I am pretty sure that I am not the only ghost user. But that is a fine task for ad pepper media. As they are based in Germany and have big plans with the free counter, I take it that they will clean out the accounts ‘tuchtig’ (profoundly).
I wonder what ad pepper media (I had to correct the name as I kept writing add pepper media) is going to do with this tool. As their company name implies, they will likely start to use the tool as a vehicle for advertisement. You can use the free counter, unless you allow advertisement. As Nedstat Basic did not have this, many non-commercial site-owners were happy with the tool. But with ads in the tool, will people not turn to many other free counters? Just a look at Google yields a list of free counters with fancy names such as shinystat.com, rightstats.com, rapidcounter.com. I hope for the Nedstat company that this does not happen in their limited earn-out period. For 3 million in cash for a free tool is not bad, but extra payment for transferring a list of free users is always welcome for a company/owners.
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