Technical Question...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32654

by veritas • 19 years ago

1 3 19 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

veritas2• 19 years ago

So a couple of days ago, TechCrunch profiled VideoCounter: http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/07/01/videocountercom-count-v...

While the company's stats tracking was simplistic (only hits are counted as far as I know), I was curious as to how they accomplished it. They're not inserting any snippets of code (a la Google Analytics) and I'm going to assume that they don't have access to the server logs, so how are they tracking page hits?

Anyone know how they are tracking the stats without embedding code or looking at logs? I'm probably missing something very simple and not knowing is... annoying :)

willarson• 19 years ago

Revver uses embedded ads to track hits on their videos, similar (sort of) to using an invisible image and counting the number of times it has been loaded.

I don't specifically know about VideoCounter, for everything the uninformative article says they could be screenscraping/using public APIs to just grab the image views and using a highly complex summation funtion (typically represented using a plus sign).

veritas2• 19 years ago

Lol okay. I was wondering if there was a magic trick behind it all. If its just screen scraping/api usage with a plus sign... it doesn't seem all that impressive.

Technical Question...

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