North American Network Operators Group
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Re: decreased caching efficiency?

  • From: Ian Cooper
  • Date: Fri Oct 20 10:40:37 2000 
At 09:44 10/20/00 -0400, Dana Hudes wrote:
I vehemently disagree with the statement that impressions do not make any sense,
only clickthroughs. There is such a thing as brand awareness, a situation where
a banner ad is good for itself even if it doesn't lead to click through.

It is NOT for YOU to decide what business model makes sense for MY
business relationship with MY advertisers.
I think the point being raised was that that business model is, by definition, based on a flawed assumption.

I pay my ISP to carry IP packets around. Caching is acceptable in some cases
but not in others. In some cases certainly your cache is in fact a copyright violation.
And browsers implementing caches in memory or disk are also causing copyright violation. Yet for the most part browser caches are considered a Good Thing.

In general I do not want people to have my photos stored in their browser cache (much less permanently saved).
I do actually have plans to change around some things in my site to take advantage
of browser and network caching (e.g. putting the style sheet in a separate file,
ditto the JavaScript and any other constant information I can).
And that saves practically nothing, given that they're very small files. Your choice, of course.

When I switch to CGI-based delivery of images the cache will of course become pass-through
since there will be no file to cache just a stream of bytes....
Is the assumption there that by using CGI you'll automatically tweak a configuration in a caching proxy? If so then it's a flawed assumption.


Having had a very quick look at your site, it seems a little strange that you want to defeat caching of those objects that soak up bandwidth; the request to perform "click-through" on the advert suggests that you're using the revenue to pay for your bandwidth costs. (So, one assumes that the more the material was cached, the less you'd have to pay, and the less you'd have to worry about page impressions.) I particularly like the way that you require my browser to send a Referer field to be allowed to view the pictures ;-)

Nice photos though...