For all his paranoia about people spying on what you do, drudgeport.com has an incredible amount of tracking going on.
Back when I was running FindAnISP.com, I actually bought advertising on his website as a test. The company handling his ads back then was careless and/or naive. After I paid for “x” thousand ads, they pointed their ad server to pick up the ad from my web server rather than copying my banner ad to their server.
What that meant is I saw in real time who visits Drudge’s server – in theory, I could easy have swapped out my ad and replaced it with something unexpected. The main thing I learned was probably 2/3 of those Drudge stats are 304 errors. His page autorefreshes the page every 3 minutes. A very large portion of the ad views I was paying for were computers sitting in a newsroom at 3 in the morning just autorefreshing my ad every 3 minutes and charging me again. I was not a happy camper and did not renew my campaign.
So I’ve used Firebug before to itemize all of the tracking crap that happens when you use some players like uStream…….. who gets told that you visited Drudge?
– adtechus.com
– rubiconproject.com
– fastclick.com
– atdmt.com
– voicefive.com
– quantserve.com
– scorecardresearch.com
– timserve.com
– intermarkets.net
– doubleclick.net
– yimg.com (Yahoo image)
– 2mdn.net
– advertising.com
– adshuffle.com
– brilig.com
– lucidmedia.com
– eproof.com
– googleapis.com
– truste.com
– mookie1.com
– doubleverify.com
A total of 131 server exchanges (and that doesn’t see the Ajax stuff it may also be doing)
Drudge is also starting to creep me out a bit.
Interesting. I haven’t been to drudge in years. You mention Ustream:
I notice Mediaplayer reports cray stuff. I use Firefox and at the bottom of the small window it cycles Lt.andomedia.com and something else I haven’t caught.
a lot of ando stuff there.
have a good one!
Andomedia does the “audience measurement” for the radio business. They publish their ratings every month and provide real-time statistics to their clients. Unlike something like TV, they have a 100% sample of all people who are streaming.
http://www.andomedia.com/
Ando Media used to be its own company, but it has been acquired into a group of holdings owned by OakTree Capital, a private equity firm that was big in the post 1996 bidding wars. OakTree got burned pretty bad in their radio investments, but now they’re investing heavily into digital streaming and buying up the other failed radio owners for pennies on the dollar as they fail – TownSquare media is where they are aggregating their purchases. They are also the owner of TargetSpot, which does the targeted ad insertion based on what they know about you.
The parent company on the digital platforms is Triton Digital, which also owns StreamTheWorld
http://audio4cast.com/2009/09/16/triton-digital-buys-andomedia/
The parent company of Triton Digital called Triton Media also owns Dial Global, the syndicator of Clark Howard, Neal Boortz and most of the liberal pukes along with a lot of those satellite delivered music services
http://www.dial-global.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=62&Itemid=104
Ando has the other radio owners in a bind – Ando has established itself as a credible service for online streaming “ratings” – one that advertisers trust. Unless they let Ando “instrument” their stations, they won’t show up in the “ratings”. If they do let Ando add their tracking code (and STW does it automatically), then OakTree and their competitor Townsquare have real-time competitive information about who is listening to their streams – very useful information if you wanted to buy and sell stocks of various radio companies.
Oaktree also has a chunk of their money invested in Cumulus, the company that is buying up Citadel/ABC.