Re: Unverifiable Transactions / Cookie draft

On Mon, 24 Mar 1997, Koen Holtman wrote:

> Rob Hartill:
> >
> [...]
> >Caching ads is very bad news for people selling ads on a per impression
> >basis. If a content site has to redirect to an ad network then it will
> >either have to cache bust everything or waive goodbye to 30-50% of their
> >revenue OR 30-50% of their ad serving capacity.
> 
> Hmm, you lost me here.  How does the cache busting by the content site
> affect the counting of ads sent by the ad network site?

If you don't go out of your way to cache-bust, the number of ads
served (redirected) by the content site will be 30-50% larger than
what the network site will receive due to clients/proxies NOT caching
a 302 redirect but caching the network provided ads.

These figures are empirical.... found the hard (expensive) way.

> >I can't see network sites trusting the content sites to report accurate
> >impression counts, 
> 
> Then we have a different opinion.  I can easily see this level of trust
> happening.

It'd also mean networks giving up far too much control over the system.
That's a tough pill for them to swallow.... assuming of course they
will try to maintain user tracking in the future.

> Anyway, I think that the value of ad rotation and user profiling is vastly
> overrated.

I agree with you there.

> Of course, it is in the best interest of ad networks to overrate
> the added value of these things: they are currently the ones who get paid
> for adding this value.

I agree there too, the added value should be questioned by the advertisers.
They do however provide a valuable source of income or additional income
for many popular sites. Anyone who has tried selling advertising for
a site will know that it's tough competeing with the big players.. letting
a big network do all the work is great. I just hope that stomping on
their cookies doesn't lead to complicated/expensive alternatives - that's
bad news for everyone - can they afford to ditch user tracking ?
...we'll see.



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Received on Monday, 24 March 1997 15:51:35 UTC