Every web server keeps a diary. Each page request lands in a log file, line after line, unreadable to most people. WebTrends turned those logs into charts a manager could understand: how many visitors came, where they came from, and which pages they read. By early 1999, more than 20,000 customers had bought its software, including over a third of the Fortune 500. Companies had built websites in a hurry and now wanted to know if anyone used them.

Two Founders in Portland

Elijahu Shapira and W. Glen Boyd built WebTrends in Portland, Oregon. The company was incorporated in 1993 and reorganized in Oregon in 1997. The bet was that every business with a website would soon need numbers to judge it, and that most of them would rather install a program than hire an analyst. WebTrends sold packaged software that a company could install on its own server and run itself.

From Nasdaq to NetIQ

WebTrends sold 3.5 million shares at $13 in February 1999, including 500,000 from its two founders. The web was booming, and so was demand for ways to measure it. Two years later, in 2001, WebTrends merged into NetIQ, a maker of systems management software. The WebTrends name outlived the deal. It kept selling web analytics for years as rivals, Google Analytics among them, made basic traffic reports free.

Cover: Arachne Being Turned into a Spider by Minerva, Maarten de Vos. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for a spider's web (web logs, the web).