WebSideStory filed to go public in 2000 and did not sell a share until September 2004. The dot-com crash came in between. The San Diego company sold web analytics, the tools that count a site's visitors and track where they click. Its HitBox service started as a free visitor counter for small sites. By 2004 it sold hosted analytics to businesses that wanted to know what their web traffic was worth.

A Hit Counter Grows Up

Blaise Barrelet founded WebSideStory in San Diego in 1996. Its first hit was HitBox, a small piece of code that counted visits and showed site owners where traffic came from. The free version spread across the early web. The company then sold a paid version, and later HBX, to businesses that wanted detailed reports on what visitors read, clicked and bought. It ran the service from its own servers, so customers had no software to install.

From WebSideStory to Visual Sciences

WebSideStory priced its IPO at $8.50 a share in September 2004 and listed on Nasdaq as WSSI. In 2006 it bought Visual Sciences, a maker of data analysis software, for $57 million, and a year later it took the Visual Sciences name. Omniture, a larger rival, agreed in October 2007 to buy the company for about $394 million in stock and cash. The deal closed in January 2008. Adobe bought Omniture in 2009.

Cover: A Spectator, from Le Café-Concert, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for a spectator watching the show (counting a site's visitors).