This isn't anything out of the ordinary or directed at 4chan (like the tweet is trying to say, in my opinion). Google Analytics is free for up to 10 million hits per month and then they ask you to upgrade to premium. Most people just assume that Google Analytics is free forever but there is a limit. I would agree that 150k per year is exorbitantly high for that service, however.
Sorry if this is a little off topic: I used to use Google Analytics but decided I wanted more control and something lighter weight (for client side web requests). I switched over to AWStats which is easy to set up and the generated reports contain enough data so I know what parts of my web sites are getting the most action.<p>Can't a big site like 4chan simply do it themselves?
My understanding is that traffic above 10M users will not be tracked by the free version of GA, but the service will continue working and recording visits. What 4chan will lose is information of all users above 10M, but will retain access to all the data.<p>I believe these emails from Google are phrased ambiguously to force upgrades.
I guess we may be seeing a story soon about 4chan swapping to an alternative analytics provider, I'm very interested to see what challenges Moot will run into whilst swapping over.
I wonder if moot could post some of the analytics data? I'd be curious to see, for example, what boards get the most traffic, where users mostly come from, etc. etc.