[Fwd: Doubleclick]

[Tim Dierks]

At 10:24 AM 7/1/96, Scott Wyant wrote:
>At 12:43 PM 6/30/96 -0700, jon at aggroup.com wrote:
>>> > >From:    Scott Wyant <scott_wyant at loop.com> Subject: COMMENT:
>>> > >
>>> > >If you're like me, you never went to a site called "doubleclick."
>>> > >So how did they give you a cookie?  After all, the idea of the
>>> > >cookie, according to the specs published by Netscape, is to make a
>>> > >more efficient connection between the server the delivers the
>>> > >cookie and the client machine which receives it.
>>> > >But we have never connected to "doubleclick."
>>
>>Scott must have. Navigator is very picky about where a cookie comes
>>from and what is put in the domain field of the cookie.
>
>Nope.  I'm afraid your information is incorrect here.  I've also watched
>other sites hand me a double-click cookie.

The way doubleclick works is that the sites who contract with them to sell
advertising space insert a URL into their page which fetches the
doubleclick ad banner. For example, the guys at TroutHeads, Inc.
(www.troutheads.com) would insert an HTML IMAGE tag with an HREF referring
to ad.doubleclick.net; that then results in _your_ browser doing an HTTP
transaction with ad.doubleclick.net; doubleclick can then hand you all the
cookies it wants.

Anytime you fetch an image, you're visiting a site, and because it's
automatic, you can easily visit a lot of sites you never knew you were
going to.

>From <URL:http://www.doubleclick.net/web_sites/htmlchange.htm>:

For any HTML document you wish to display an ad banner for, simply add the
following
     HTML tags:

     <CENTER><A HREF="http://ad.doubleclick.net/jump/MY_URL">
     <IMG SRC="http://ad.doubleclick.net/ad/MY_URL" WIDTH=468 HEIGHT=60
     ISMAP></A>
     <BR><FONT SIZE="2">Click on graphic to find out more!</FONT></CENTER>

     Where MY_URL is the URL for the HTML document displaying the ad banner. For
     example:

     <CENTER><A
     HREF="http://ad.doubleclick.net/jump/www.iaf.net/htmlchange.htm">
     <IMG SRC="http://ad.doubleclick.net/ad/www.iaf.net/htmlchange.htm"
     WIDTH=468 HEIGHT=60 ISMAP></A>
     <BR><FONT SIZE="2">Click on graphic to find out more!</FONT></CENTER>

 - Tim

Tim Dierks - Software Haruspex - tim at dierks.org

"...when ketchup finally comes out of the bottle, it is going a good 25 miles a
year.... It rolls along at three-thousandths of a mile an hour. Heinz knows the
speed because it has a device called a Bostwickometer, a chutelike contraption
that calculates the speed at which ketchup travels."
 - The New York Times, June 12, 1996