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 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. 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). 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.... ----- Original Message ----- From: "William Allen Simpson" <wsimpson@greendragon.com> To: <nanog@merit.edu> Sent: Friday, October 20, 2000 8:24 AM Subject: Re: decreased caching efficiency?
Daniel Senie wrote:
It might be worth thinking about the problem from the other end. From a web site owner's perspective, caching is a major annoyance. Here are the arguments you may encounter from a web site owner or web developer:
1. It interferes with content in many cases (web site visitors may see cached pages instead of current content). I know cache products claim this doesn't happen, but it has, and often.
In reality, there are very few things that are dynamic. I don't honor zero time expiry. Even MRTG doesn't need a granularity of less than 30 seconds.
2. The website owner loses information on how many visitors are coming to the site.
Why should the ISP care about a faulty model? Does the website owner pay the ISPs to collect such information?
3. The website owner loses the demographics on where visitors are coming from, and especially the number of unique visitors. (It's not helpful to know that one cache engine visited, if that cache engine equated to 10,000 visits in an hour).
People go to websites to learn information. They don't go to websites to involuntarily give information. It's a de facto privacy violation.
4. Banner advertising may or may not display properly when caching is involved, thereby costing the website money.
Not all business plans are viable. Click-throughs may work properly, but impressions do not make any sense.
5. There's NOTHING in it for the website owner, other than the possibility that SOME pages might display faster for SOME users.
Don't website owners have to pay for bandwidth?
If folks running networks really think website designers and owners should care about caching, then there needs to be some sort of benefit (perhaps paid in dollars) to those affected.
If website owners don't properly interact with caching, then there needs to be some sort of benefit (definitely paid in dollars) to those affected.
WSimpson@UMich.edu Key fingerprint = 17 40 5E 67 15 6F 31 26 DD 0D B9 9B 6A 15 2C 32