- From: Koen Holtman <koen@win.tue.nl>
- Date: Wed, 10 Jul 1996 12:33:21 +0200 (MET DST)
- To: Paul Leach <paulle@microsoft.com>
- Cc: http-wg%cuckoo.hpl.hp.com@hplb.hpl.hp.com
Paul Leach:
[...]
>It is alleged that some advertisers want to pay content providers, not
>by the "hit", but by the "nibble" -- the number of people who actually
>click on the ad to get more info.
[...]
>What I'm looking for are comments on the privacy concerns with such an
>approach.
I don't think that a two-way referer field can solve the nibble count
problem. For it to work, two-way referer would have to be enabled by
default, but for privacy reasons, it would have to be disabled by
default. My proposal is to add no extra mechanism, and to rely on
schemes that embed the referrer in the URI like this:
http://www.blah.com/index?from=site1
By having the above URI point to a CGI script which returns a 302
redirect to the real home page http://www.blah.com/ , this scheme can
be made to act in a cache-friendly way, especially if the 302 can be
cached by proxies which report hits.
In my opinion, HTTP already supports nibble counting in an adequate way.
There is no need to add a new mechanism. The gains which could be had
by adding a new --working-- mechanism would not outweigh the cost of the
mechanism and its introduction.
>Paul J. Leach Email: paulle@microsoft.com
Koen.
Received on Wednesday, 10 July 1996 03:39:07 UTC