[LINK] Redirects, User counters and Advertising

[Adrian Chadd]

On Mon, Feb 26, 2007, Marghanita da Cruz wrote:

> One of the easiest ways of counting pageviews is the use of a graphic.
> The owner of the graphic/image/logo, the owner of the website can source
> the use which may or may not be legitimate. Ofcourse the "evil" will
> just copy the graphic.

Pageviews is only part of it. People also would like to correlate
individual users with page accesses, and a simple image won't cut it.

These days you can (ab)use Javascript to fix this - the simplest way
involves having a page (static or dynamic) have some embedded javascript
which will generate a unique image URL. Or unique ad with the site URL
and user info.

Unfortunately its hard to describe these issues to end-users because
they haven't seen the information being abused - and you get
accused of being a conspiracy theory nut. :P




Adrian