new news!

Headline: In Web Traffic Tallies, Intruders Can Say You Visited Them
Date: December 11, 2006
Source: New York Times

Another online fraud. Nielsen/NetRating, a leading company in measuring Internet traffic, sharply cut its previously reported statistics for the financial Web site Entrepreneur.com to 2 million unique visitors in April, from 7.6 million. Oh wow. That is almost 6 million unique visitors there. The reason is when users visit other sites, new browsers windows pop up containing articles from Entrepreneur.com. The unusual thing is that these pop-ups contain news content, like articles on how to start a small business, making the readers hard to distinguish from an intentional visit to the site itself.
Publishers may use every technique they found to gain readers’ eyeballs in order to generate more money. Moreover, push traffic is very common now. You can push your ad pop-up, pop-down, pop-under, pop-left, pop-right .. blah blah blah. However, these ads should be factored out clearly and left alone the true unique visitors.