On Sunday 25 Sep 2011 04:09:22 Jimmy Hess wrote:
On Sat, Sep 24, 2011 at 8:33 PM, Cameron Byrne <cb.list6@gmail.com> wrote:
Just an fyi for anyone who has a marketing person dreaming up a big nxdomain redirect business cases, the stats are actually very very poor... it does not make much money at all. It is very important to ask the redirect partners about yields... meaning, you may find that less than 5% of nxdomain redirects can be actually served
Not to take any position on there being a "business case" for NXDOMAIN redirect, or not but.... the percentage of NXdomain redirects that actually serve ads isn't too important. It's absolute numbers that matter, even if it's just 1% of NXDOMAINS by percent.
The rest of the 99% are referred to as "noise" and aren't relevant for justifying or failing to justify.
The important number is at what frequency the _average_ user will encounter the redirect while they are surfing. If a sufficient proportion of their users see the ads at a sufficient rate, then they will probably justify whatever cost they have for the ad serving.
When they are doing this crappy stuff like redirecting google.com DNS to intercept search requests; I have little doubt that they are able to inject sufficient volume of ads to make some sort of "business case" behind the hijacking evilness.
Regards,
-- -JH
I think a special mention should go to hardware vendors who adopt this dreadful practice in network equipment. I recently encountered an enterprise-grade WLAN router from vendor D that has the horrible habit of intercepting some % of queries to its local DNS cache resolver and forwarding to an affiliate Yahoo! search page, lousy with ads, under vendor D's control. This includes things like www.google.co.uk. I don't manage this device and therefore have opened a ticket with those who do to get them to turn the damn thing off, while in the meantime adding *.[vendor D]search.com 127.0.0.1 to my /etc/hosts. I must admit to being tempted to "fault" it with something heavy in order to force its replacement:-) But if anyone from vendor-D is on the list: congratulations, you've managed to invent a network device that is by definition untrustworthy, and I will never buy anything from your company. -- The only thing worse than e-mail disclaimers...is people who send e-mail to lists complaining about them