Episode 95: Marko Saric of Plausible Analytics, the most popular Open Source analytics platform

Guest Marko Saric Panelists Eric Berry | Justin Dorfman | Richard
Littauer Show Notes Hello and welcome to Sustain! The podcast where
we talk about sustaining open source for the long haul. We hope you
are as excited as we are to have as our guest today Marko Saric,
who is the Co-Founder of Plausible Analytics, which is an open
source and privacy friendly alternative to Google Analytics. If
you’ve never heard about Plausible Analytics, then this is your
episode to learn all about it. With over 4,000 subscribers in the
past year, Marko tells us what they’ve done to get people to
convert. He also gives us his perspective on how he sees the
business surviving in the next ten years, what his future game plan
is, and why it’s so important that Plausible Analytics is open
source. Download this episode now to learn so much more from Marko!
[00:01:33] Marko tells us what he does as one of the Co-Founders,
how long Plausible Analytics has been around, and how many
subscribers they have. [00:03:57] Justin asks Marko how he handles
the bots and how much of a threat are they in terms of making sure
that they don’t mess up someone’s expectations in terms of traffic.
[00:06:15] We find out how Justin found Marko which was from a blog
post he wrote and Justin wonders how this issue has converted
people that are so Google dependent in terms of Google Analytics to
turn over to a paid service like this, and how the shift has been
since he was brought on board. [00:10:25] Eric wonders what’s to
prevent developers from adding blockers to this system and is there
a reason why they would or would not. [00:17:59] Marko tells us how
he sees his business surviving in the next ten years, and if he
sees any big plans that he is trying to push to make it so there is
that harmony between advertisers and the consumers. [00:24:12]
Richard wonders what Marko’s game plan in twenty-five years, where
he wants to go in the future, and how to build a more sustainable
web for everyone. [00:27:46] Does Marko see Plausible Analytics
staying independent or possibly joining a company? [00:30:40]
Justin shares a conspiracy theory about what he thinks Brave is
doing to Plausible Analytics and Marko shares his thoughts.
[00:32:59] Richard asks Marko why it’s important that Plausible is
open source. [00:35:29] Marko tells us if he’s worried about people
taking the code and just running another “Pausable” Analytics as a
fork. Quotes [00:13:14] “My thinking is let’s try to make the devs
better by getting website owners to use better tools for people
that use ad blockers - the fact is still that most people don’t use
ad blockers.” [00:15:01] “There’s a huge disconnect between people,
like all of us here in the chat and the more kind of normal dev
user.” [00:22:04] “If you actually give your vote and say no, or no
to this and yes to that, you’re actually voting to make a change.”
[00:22:14] “That’s one of the main Key Performance Indicators these
days in companies is how many people are saying yes or no to that
little banner we have on our sites.” [00:22:23] “I’m going to take
my three seconds to click on options and then scroll down and click
on reject because I know that it makes a difference.” [00:24:35]
“Yeah, I mean GDPR was a great first step and I think if there can
be something similar, but actually just going off to the personal
data.” [00:24:48] “Many websites that I visit, the newspapers and
so on, they will live from the ads.” [00:25:00] “I understand that
there is a need for ads while that is the main monetization method
of the web.” [00:26:15] “A few weeks ago, Ethical Ads installed
Plausible and they wrote a blog post about it and I was like,
“Perfect!” [00:27:19] “You can find people doing studies on their
own website, and like personal ads versus contextual ads, they’re
seeing no difference in terms of effectiveness or in the kind of
income they get or the conversion rate or whatever.” [00:27:34]
“You can actually do good business, both as a publisher but also as
an advertiser, just by talking to people contextually or whatever
other way they can find out that’s not really necessary as part of
surveillance capitalism.” [00:28:45] “We just do our own thing and
try to kind of do our own little sustainable business.” [00:33:19]
“If you’re not open source and you’re talking about privacy first
you will probably be excluded from the conversation. People will
not take you serious.” [00:33:58] “And if you’re proprietary, a lot
of people with technical knowledge and people really deep into this
would not trust us because we’re just saying things. We don’t know
who you are. Why would we trust you?” [00:35:08] “I gotta trust
that by being open source and having so many eyeballs on it at
least if there some kind of sketchy going on or whatever, somebody
will kind of flag it.” [00:35:40] “I was completely new to all this
licensed system. I had no idea I was using WordPress and stuff.”
[00:36:29] “And I was like, again, I was new to the open since I
had no idea that this is how it can work, that they will just
upfront come to us and tell us, we don’t want to do anything to
help you, but can you please do something so it helps us so we can
kind of complete video and we have tens of thousands more of
audience?” [00:37:47] “And we ended up with AGPL and we felt this
was a great kind of license for our own situation.” [00:38:41]
“Honestly from our perspective, like if we want to make this a
thing that could become sustainable in the future, pay our own
bills so we can focus on it full-time and then hopefully make a
difference.” [00:39:32] “I know that my Co-Founder says that if
you’re doing like a database and things for developers, you
probably want to be MIT because then other companies can use other
projects. But I would say if you’re coming from my perspective, as
somebody who has to communicate the message and kind of
differentiate ourselves and try to compete with what else is on the
market, I was like, if you’re going to sell to consumers and other
businesses, like it’s going to be really difficult to survive it in
IT.” [00:39:57] “Again, as a beginner there are MIT licenses that
have worked very well and they’re sustainable, but I just don’t
know how I would compete with a bigger company.” Spotlight
[00:40:31] Eric’s spotlight is a newsletter he signed up for called
Console.dev. [00:40:54] Justin’s spotlight is a great read,
“Developer, You May Need a Co-Founder in Marketing,” by Rauno
Metsa, Microfounder of MicroFounder. [00:41:30] Richard’s spotlight
is Andre Greig, a Scottish poet and his book called, Getting
Higher: The Complete Mountain Poems. [00:41:44] Marko’s spotlights
are Linux, Firefox, and WordPress. Links SustainOSS
(https://sustainoss.org/) SustainOSS Twitter
(https://twitter.com/SustainOSS?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor)
SustainOSS Discourse (https://discourse.sustainoss.org/) Marko
Saric Website (https://markosaric.com/) Marko Saric Twitter
(https://twitter.com/markosaric) Plausible (https://plausible.io/)
The Plausible Blog (https://plausible.io/blog) Ethical Ads
Newsletter July 2021
(https://www.ethicalads.io/blog/2021/08/ethicalads-newsletter-july-2021/)
“58% of Hacker News, Reddit and tech-savvy audiences block Google
Analytics” by Marko Saric
(https://plausible.io/blog/google-analytics-adblockers-missing-data)
Console (https://console.dev/) “Developer, You May Need a
Co-Founder in Marketing” by Rauno Metsa
(https://microfounder.com/blog/cofounder-in-marketing) Getting
Higher: The Complete Mountain Poems by Andrew Greig
(https://www.amazon.com/Getting-Higher-Complete-Mountain-Poems/dp/1846971926)
Linux (https://www.kernel.org/category/about.html) Mozilla Firefox
(https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/new/) WordPress
(https://wordpress.org/) Credits Produced by Richard Littauer
(https://www.burntfen.com/) Edited by Paul M. Bahr at Peachtree
Sound (https://www.peachtreesound.com/) Show notes by DeAnn Bahr at
Peachtree Sound (https://www.peachtreesound.com/) Special Guest:
Marko Saric.