We’re running a little experiment to re-enable plausible web analytics for jupyter.org , in the hopes that this gives us a data stream that we can use to guide marketing and communications in the future (the hope is that LF can help us with this!).
We’ve set up plausible analytics and you can see a dashboard of jupyter.org traffic here:
Here’s the issue where we are tracking this:
opened 06:32PM - 29 Aug 25 UTC
### Next actions
- [x] Decide if it's safe to try Plausible for our web analyti… cs
- [x] Merge Plausible analytics on jupyter.org on a 1-month trial: #816
- [ ] See [our public dashboard here](https://plausible.io/jupyter.org)
- [ ] Wait a month and see if we generally like the Plausible experience.
- [ ] (Late September) Decide what to do next
### Context
A few years ago we stopped using Google Analytics due to GDPR concerns. This means that we no longer have information about how people are navigating Jupyter.org (or other jupyter sub-projects). This kind of information is useful for demonstrating reach and impact, and is also useful in guiding Marketing experiments to understand whether we're directing attention to Jupyter resources in expected ways.
I propose that we identify an analytics service we can use with jupyter.org that:
- Is not at-risk of legal challenges relating to GDPR
- Gives us information about traffic flow in/out/through jupyter.org
- Can scale to subproject docs as well
- Does not require significant human time to maintain
- Is not extremely expensive
### Idea for implementation
Chris's suggestion: use a plausible.io plan.
Plausible.io is what I've heard most-often recommended here. It is fairly expensive though, and limited to 10 sites for an enterprise plan. They do not have open source or non-profit plans. They [have their codebase online](https://github.com/plausible/analytics) and you can self-host it, but I'd strongly suggest we just pay for them.
### Anybody know of obvious better alternatives?
I know there are a million analytics services out there. If somebody knows of another one that matches the conditions above and is obviously better than Plausible, then please suggest it! If not obvious, then I'd lean towards "just using plausible" so that we go down a rabbit hold of debate.
> [!NOTE]
> Anybody want to advocate for Matomo?
>
> I think that's the most likely alternative, and [what the Binder team uses](https://mybinder-sre.readthedocs.io/en/latest/components/matomo.html). That said, in Chris' experience the Matomo instance for mybinder.org has been *very* slow and kind of unreliable.
### How to pay for this
I suggest we:
- Ask the Foundation for a discretionary Marketing budget that they + the JMS have control over, and use this to pay for Plausible. If not that, then:
- Use EC discretionary funds for this. If not that, then:
- Write a proposal for the Foundation specifically for this via community proposals.
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