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[Rollingstone206]

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[steve B]

I believe many of the ones on Ebay are from the advertising company that serves the ads. Doubleclick.net. With IE each attempt to contact the ad service is treated as an individual web page as far as the history for the back button is concerned.

What that does is to essentially disable the back button. Somewhere in excess of 120 will wipe out the back button history. 60-90 is more typical.
I have them blocked, but still need 2-3 clicks to return to the search results from an item listing. Firefox treats them differently, but their zoom feature is far less easy to use than the one in IE.

Those places use the analytics to prove the number of views and number of unique users. That determines how much they get paid for the ads.
It's also common on places like yardbarker where there's the story summary, clickthrough to the "story" on another site listing a bunch of stories, then finally clicking through to the actual story. Each clickthrough page counts as a page view, and they do it that way to get that number up making the ads worth more - at least to someone who doesn't actually check the data or site.

It's also how places like Amazon recommend other books based on what you've looked at. Probably Ebays new gallery style homepage too.

None of that is either good or bad, I hate the ads, but I know they're not going away any time soon.


I haven't seen many that collected information like bid ammounts, but I'd assume it's possible. Some of the ones that got out of hand got stopped by various internet watchdog groups or major companies.

It's all in how they're used. Most of the major companies are very careful about keeping identifiable information out of the databse. In other words while they know user X browses baseball books and user Y looks at romances, and can show either user a new book they might want, they don't know who they actually are or if there's any relation between them.
Not that they couldn't, but for a huge company it's a major legal concern.

As I tell a couple of my privacy paranoid friends you usually give up more information by using a bank card, or cellphone. And in each instance it's considered a good thing. (Remember the BOA ads where they had people talking about how bank snooping on their purchases caught fraud before it got out of hand?) And the cell companies advertise apps that can locate stores or restaurants you might like AND that might be really near where you are right now. That's done with the GPS tracking some people get upset about.

Steve b