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I thought this was a really fun video about the history of the web and how we got to where we are today. I’ve been working on the internet since 1995. I started out building websites for companies, then moved into building tools that helped power and measure the web. Most of my career has been spent around website analytics (Omniture sold to Adobe), and now website governance. One thing that really stands out looking back is just how much complexity we kept adding. Analytics. Cookies. Third-party technologies. Privacy. Accessibility. Consent. Performance. And now AI is making it even easier to create and change websites at a massive scale. For a long time the web really was the Wild West. In a lot of ways, it still is. That is a big part of why I wanted to build ObservePoint. I wanted to make it easier for companies to actually understand what is happening across their websites and manage all of this complexity. The goal has always been pretty simple: build the best website scanner in the world. Something that can look at a site from the perspective of compliance, hygiene, usability and function — and help you find the things that are broken, risky, missing or just shouldn’t be there. I especially liked the line at the end of the video: “30 years ago, the job was building a website. Today, the job is governing one.” That feels pretty accurate. Let me know below in the comments if you are feeling any of the pain of maintaining any part of a website.

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30 years ago this month, Josh James and I started Omniture. We were early pioneers in web analytics. Today, it’s part of Adobe. I’ve watched this industry grow from nothing into something incredibly powerful. It’s also become incredibly complex. And heavily regulated. And honestly, what I’m seeing now keeps me up at night. ObservePoint recently scanned the Fortune 1000. Here’s what we found: → 71% still drop third party cookies on visitors who clicked “don’t track me” → 55% load advertising trackers after a user opts out → 93% ignore Global Privacy Control signals from California visitors → 89% have critical accessibility issues This isn’t a few bad actors. This is the norm. In Europe, where regulators have real teeth, it’s not much better: → 50% of the top 1,000 sites set third party cookies without consent → 30% fire ad tags before any consent is given And enforcement is ramping up: Healthline ($1.55M) Honda ($632K) Sephora ($1.2M) Fashion Nova ($5.15M) ADA website lawsuits are up 37% year over year. Here’s the part most leaders miss: This is not a martech problem. It’s a governance problem. The tools exist. Tag managers, CMPs, analytics platforms. They mostly work. What’s missing is verification. No one is consistently checking what’s actually happening across every page, every region, every release. Trust is the operating system of the modern web. I said this recently at Adobe Summit: “AI is about speed. But speed without trust is a liability. If you don’t verify privacy and data quality, you’re just scaling bad decisions.” Right now, a lot of teams are shipping bugs. Some of them are lawsuits waiting to happen. So the real question is: What is your team doing to verify what’s actually firing on your site? If you’re curious, go see it for yourself: https://lnkd.in/gbprJwBq

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