Beck has been on a rant against Google this past week, accusing the search giant of being a “shill” for the US government. Now he’s claiming “not leading a boycott” but he’s “not so sure” that he wants “to use their products any more than” he has to. He even has a featured story on his site titled “From the show: Reduce your Google use.” While he won’t call it a boycott, he is certainly advocating to get his faithful viewers to follow him in this endeavor.
Yet, he’s still using Google every time someone visits his site. His Website, glennbeck.com, uses Google Analytics to count and track his visitors. This is public knowledge, able to be displayed for the world to see.
The above screen show shows lines 1316-1333 of Beck’s home page where the Google Analytics code is used. For you non-techies, this code is on every page of Beck’s site and is used to track every visitor to his site and what they do once they get there.
Beck also has Google ads running on his Web site. When visitors to his site click on these ads, it makes him (and Google) money. Does he really need the few cents per click he gets from those ads? So, he’s tracking his visitors and making money from Google software. So much for using them less.
To the right is a screen shot of his Web site showing the ads.
So – not surprisingly – Beck’s whole Don’t use Google campaign is just more rhetoric than actual truth.
For the record, there are a myriad of free and commercial alternatives to Google Analytics. I found a whole list of them on Google!
Shouldn’t we all visit his site and click on all of the Google ads?