At 03:32 PM 4/20/97 -0500, Adam Shostack wrote:
Thats true, but can they avoid it? I'm considering writing a database pollution bot, which runs around, claiming to be Mozilla or IE, and randomly following a link once per minute. Why? Database pollution. If there are a few thousand of these randomly collecing links and creating arbitrary (or perhaps biased) viewing habbits in the databases of the advertisers, then their individual data becomes worth less. They'll need to actively solicit peoples permission to collect data before doing so, to avoid people polluting their databases.
Similarly, putting a randomly generated email address in those sign up fields produces pollution in the data used by spammers, which costs them (and no one else) money. If you run your own site, you can even bit bucket the email, trading their bandwidth for yours, and making them think they're delivering more junk email than they are.
You are forgetting to separate the marketers from the businesses being marketed here. While they're occasionally one and the same (see Cantor & Siegel), in today's world, the marketing is being handled by a third party (doubleclick). These marketers get paid by hit-count ratings: if they deliver the message to 1,000 browsers, they get some amount, say $15.00. If they deliver it to 100,000 browsers, they get $1500.00. They're not paid by the number of respondents, referred sales, or even valid e-mail addresses snarfed. So, you'd only be artifically inflating the cost of the marketers to the advertisers. Here, your hope is that the advertisers notice a diminishing ROI for marketing costs, but that's a big hope. The numbers for a small site might look something like this: January - 20,000 hits, 50 sales February - 22,000 hits, 60 sales March - 25,000 hits, 70 sales April - 50,000 hits, 90 sales <-- pollutionbot strikes 20,000 times So, you've watered it down a bit. To make the pollutionbot truly effective, you'd have to hit a site by at least 10x the general population strikes: May - 440,000 hits, 100 respondents <- pollutionbot strikes 400,000 times In the meantime, they're billing the business: Month Hits Sales Billing Cost/sale Pollutionbot hits/inflation January - 20,000 50 $300 $6.00 0 $0 February - 22,000 60 $330 $5.50 0 $0 March - 25,000 70 $375 $5.36 0 $0 April - 50,000 90 $750 $8.33 20,000 $300 May - 440,000 100 $6600 $66.00 400,000 $6000 Hopefully, the advertisers will pull out at this point. It's easy to see that something "bad" is happening, and that they're not getting the bang for the buck that they need. However, with some megasites (where they reportedly get 2,000,000+ hits per day) subscribing to doubleclick.com, it's doubtful you could make a noticable dent unless you started your attack from a T3 connected backbone site. And even then, are you sure you want to spend your resources this way? The marketers will also try to keep this sham up by saying to the businesses, "It's the Internet, who the hell knows? Keep going another month, it'll get better. In the meantime, just pay your bills." Even if you were successful at flooding doubleclick, many of their advertisers are Big: IBM, Micro$oft, HP, etc. They don't even care about direct responses, they're just after name recognition. Ultimately, it'll reduce the ability of Mom & Pop (or Cantor & Siegel) to advertise on the same playing field as Micro$oft. Doubleclick won't go broke; neither will Micro$oft. The only good hope you may have is of breaking a "mom & pop" version of doubleclick, and keeping the world less polluted. But, doubleclick will still be around and be able to move in and fill the void. What have you gained then? John -- J. Deters "Don't think of Windows programs as spaghetti code. Think of them as 'Long sticky pasta objects in OLE sauce'." +--------------------------------------------------------------------+ | NET: mailto:jad@dsddhc.com (work) mailto:jad@pclink.com (home) | | PSTN: 1 612 375 3116 (work) 1 612 894 8507 (home) | | ICBM: 44^58'36"N by 93^16'27"W Elev. ~=290m (work) | | For my public key, send mail with the exact subject line of: | | Subject: get pgp key | +--------------------------------------------------------------------+