- From: Benjamin Franz <snowhare@netimages.com>
- Date: Wed, 10 Jul 1996 06:27:06 -0700 (PDT)
- To: Koen Holtman <koen@win.tue.nl>
- Cc: Paul Leach <paulle@microsoft.com>, http-wg%cuckoo.hpl.hp.com@hplb.hpl.hp.com, http-wg%cuckoo.hpl.hp.com@hplb.hpl.hp.com
On Wed, 10 Jul 1996, Koen Holtman wrote:
> 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.
#!/usr/bin/perl
$_ = $ENV{'PATH_INFO'};
s#^/##o;
print "Location: $_\r\n\r\n";
(Ok - so, I'm depending on the server to add the 302 code. If you want
to, you can add the one line change).
I use this to count hits on links going *out* from our site. It wouldn't
be hard to integrate the functionality into a server for performance.
Anyway - it doesn't require any changes to HTTP.
--
Benjamin Franz
Received on Wednesday, 10 July 1996 06:37:29 UTC