Perhaps an interesting idea?

Right now if one goes to www.scifi.com/b5rangers one will find an advertising link at the top of the page. It says "B5: Legend of the Rangers sponsored by Jeep". When one clicks on the link it takes one to the Jeep website. Now here is my question. With internet advertising does the advertiser know where the websurfer is coming from? In short if I, being at the SFC website, click on their link and go to Jeep, will Jeep know that I arrived from the SFC site?

The reason why I ask this is obvious. If we all went and clicked on the Jeep link from the SFC Rangers site it would be a wonderful display of support for Rangers. So, does anyone know the answer?

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Be careful not to go overboard.

A Pokemon site I used to go to was down on the cash, could barely support itself. The people who went there started clicking furiously on the banners.

The companies didn't like that one bit.

They can figure out what site you're coming from. And that's also part of the problem. They'll eventually figure out that these people aren't interested in the products/services, only in stuffing the ballot box so to speak. The advertisements were pulled.

Moderation, my friends.

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Sheridan: Are you trying to cheer me up?
Ivanova: No sir, wouldn't dream of it.
Sheridan: Good, I hate being cheered up. It's depressing.
Ivanova: So in that case we're all going to die horrible, painful, lingering deaths.
Sheridan: Thank you, I feel so much better now.

They certainly can find out where you're comming from as Microsoft found out in a recent oopsie of theirs. There was a Zdnet or Cnet poll about .Net, it was doing VERY poorly compared to everything else. Within a matter of a few hours (might be wrong about the time frame) .Net was ranked highest. The site with the poll went and looked where all these votes came from..you guessed it Microsoft.com.

So yes by clicking on Jeep constantly it could appear to Jeep that Sci-fi is despirate for the series to be big (all they'll see most likely is scifi.com) and they could cut the sponsorship.

As above moderation.

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Well, I looked at the link of another ad on SCIFI.COM. It includes CGI parameters for the target site, so naturally it can be tracked.

As for taking interest in advertisments... I only take interest if they interest me. If they interest me enough to buy something, I prefer prefer arrive at the seller's website via an advertisement on a site which I would wish to support.

Example: when I decided to buy the Babtlon 5 DVD, I visited Amazon.com through the advertisement on B5LR. Naturally they registered where the buying visitor came from, so it should have served a double purpose.

Other than that, I never follow web-based advertisements, instead doing my best to block them out.

[This message has been edited by Lennier (edited January 29, 2002).]