Nxdomain redirect revenue

Sun Sep 25 11:39:53 UTC 2011

On Sunday 25 Sep 2011 04:09:22 Jimmy Hess wrote:
> On Sat, Sep 24, 2011 at 8:33 PM, Cameron Byrne <cb.list6 at 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
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