Re: Alexa - Bad? Really Bad?

From: Clint Ballard <clint_at_accelerationsw.com>
Date: Sun, 14 Feb 1999 22:02:55 -0600 (CST)

JOEL SHELLMAN WROTE:
> Alexa isn't the only one doing such things. Various other
> programs, especially such things as free ISP and
> acceleration software are doing similar things.
>
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I hope that there is no confusion between the "acceleration
software" in Joel's post and "Acceleration Software" the
company. We have developed Webcelerator which is a web
accelerator with many different features. Very early in our
Beta test period, we found and FIXED the problem of falsely
pinging ad banners during prefetch. I believe Joel is
referring to some of the other pre-fetching only products
that blatantly ignore this problem and artificially raise
the apparent number of impressions and clickthroughs.
Webcelerator has been shipping with the Pre-fetching
function defaulted OFF since last July, due to the
relatively large amount of bandwidth it uses. While there
are cases where this functionality is very useful, our users
decide when it is appropriate to prefetch the entire page.
Please note, that even when enabled our pre-fetching
function will not pre-fetch ad banners and it certainly
won't clickthrough on them. Webcelerator relies mainly on
its other features to accelerate surfing, from TCP/IP
optimization, updating most popular sites and especially our
bandwidth SAVING Show and Verify mode. We are the inventors
of this technique that speeds up surfing by dramatically
reducing the bandwidth used.

I am very aware of the possibilty of a program such as
Webcelerator to adversely impact the overall performance of
the Internet and alter the apparent results of ad campaigns.
 It is very important to me that all of our products are
Internet friendly and advertiser friendly. Because of this
low level experience with the Internet protocols, I am
keenly aware of all sorts of problems that do not seem to be
common knowledge. For instance, there was a period last
year where it looked like almost 50% of the activity was
coming from robots and not people. If you are spending
online advertising dollars you really need to make sure you
are advertising to people and not robots. I think the
overall decline in CTR that the industry is seeing is partly
(a significant part) due to robots generating a lot of
traffic.

It is out of this experience that I have designed our
"http://www.clicksales.com" and
"http://www.downloadsales.com" advertising. I want to make
sure that companies that advertise with us only pay for
advertising seen by people. Even though we sacrifice
counting valid clickthroughs from people, I have made sure
that we filter out as many of the robots out there as
possible. The worst that happens is that the robot will
sneak one clickthrough past us, but that is all, there is no
chance that dozens or even thousands of clickthroughs will
be generated by a robot. The fact that we take great pains
to ensure this, improves the quality of our traffic by a
significant amount.

Clint Ballard
C.E.O. of Acceleration Software
"http://www.clicksales.com" and "http://www.downloadsales.com"
Cost-Per-Click and Cost-Per Download Ads with a 100% money-back guarantee


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Received on Mon Feb 15 1999 - 09:08:51 CST