Subject: Re: (Fwd) Re: Caches, proxies, hit reporting, and online services From: josh@the-tech.mit.edu (Josh Hartmann) Date: Thu, 4 May 1995 16:48:30 -0400

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>Here's another: abandon using Web hits to derive circulation numbers
>and, in turn, ad rates. Remember, the hit numbers generated by a
>single access to a page are a variable depending upon several
>factors, including the number of images on the page.

I disagree with this.

The way advertising is (or at least should be) sold is by the number of
times the advertiser's button gets downloaded. So if the button is called
"ad.gif" then that image shows up 50,000 times in the logs, then that's how
many people saw that ad.

So.... if "ad.gif" is in the cache on a proxy, then fewer hits are reported.

Then in addition to that, if the button is hot to AT&T's web site, the
number of times that button is pressed can be logged through a redirection
program and should result in an additional charge.

(I don't know the technical details of how redirection messages are handled
with caches to know if the redirection message itself is maintained by the
cache. It could be, and that would further influence the statistics
undesirably.)

>Recall also that
>caching has always been with us, it's just more noticeable now with
>the arrival of the big three. What does all this mean? It means that
>simple translations from hit numbers to circulation figures have always
>been unreliable and that they're only going to get more so as caching
>becomes more prevalent.

This is a very good point.

-Josh

__________________________________________________________________________
Josh Hartmann       Webmaster, The Virtual Garden http://pathfinder.com/vg
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__________________________________________________________________________
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To: josh@the-tech.mit.edu (Josh Hartmann)