Overture service and Versign now owns your use of .COM and .NET?

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

Date: Wed, 17 Sep 2003 10:33:42 -0400
From: Ron Thigpen <rthigpen () nc rr com>
Subject: Re: [IP] more on Versign now owns your use of .COM and .NET?
To: dave () farber net

For IP:

When a user is redirected to Verisign's search "service" via their bogus 
DNS resolution, they will be sent to this site: 
<http://sitefinder.verisign.com/>, which displays a simple search engine 
interface.

Searching on a term or choosing a category leads to a simple results 
listing, presumably selected and ordered based on how well these sites 
match the search term.  The search result links appear to lead directly to 
the destination sites.  Hovering the cursor over these links will even 
display these site's basic URL in the browser's status bar.  But this is 
all a carefully designed ruse.

These links actually lead back to a service that has been accepting bids 
from the site owners for placement of these links in the search 
results.  There is an ongoing auction for this placement.  Clicking these 
links registers the fact that this user, as tracked by persistent cookies, 
has visited a given site.  The link HTML looks something like this:

<a 
href="http://www2.overture.com/d/sr/?xargs=02u3hs9yoaUFVuwSDE%2FQxymoap1AxyaVNBjNqHqZVNadaKx7Sky0IjoLtJ6%2B1IR2mlYQg9Y7374eew%2FzteQmc2d3aNeQn53zQhJmZ%2FKqExgh8sSUAIXurSMoFILkDIEodW9j4Iyp2zvT3tffa%2Fdq3rB39OsRphKFeVkWwvIecgSJMElojniZC%2BItIk93vrKa%2Fgms4J5K5UIlarW2VCLLgycUN2N3SdhjD90hLLUVVSHqggCub9ZCwP7UTfjx%2Bttq90PaVPRzkMykVOeOAZZ4yOgyfFY%2F9W2qjPhXLmFJJjxb%2F5lRdrsXO%2FmiFOntYLd9MKuM%2FXuymXlw2WMWKMNj3zF9NH%2B7yQNIgDe2jJGd9aduis3PtxydTG126RlbNoDJRUK8UBfmV1qHs%3D";
onMouseOver="self.status='www.somesite.com'; return true;"
onMouseOut="self.status='';" 
onClick='trk_link("www.tannerspecan.com","Sponsor","01/10","","","");'
>Description of somesite.com</a>

Descriptions of how the Overture service is bidding out search terms are 
available here (watch for cookies):
<http://www.content.overture.com/d/USm/ays/index.jhtml>
<http://www.content.overture.com/d/USm/ac/ba/how.jhtml>

This is a profitable business.  Facilitated "introductions" of consumers to 
client websites are currently averaging 40 cents per event.  Note that 
Verisign is far from the only search service in the Overture 
network.  Others include MSN, Yahoo!, Lycos, etc.  Yahoo! is in the process 
of acquiring Overture.  Google is not a client.

<quote 
src="http://www.corporate-ir.net/ireye/ir_site.zhtml?ticker=OVER&script=410&layout=0&item_id=434385";>
The key metrics driving Overture's revenue are paid introductions (when a 
user clicks on an Overture listing provided by an advertiser) and the 
average price per introduction paid by Overture's advertisers. [...]

Advertisers continued to increase the amount of their keyword bids in 
Overture's dynamic marketplace. On a worldwide basis, advertisers paid 
Overture an average of $0.40 for each paid introduction during the second 
quarter of 2003, a three-cent sequential increase from $0.37 in the first 
quarter of 2003.
</quote>

All of this is hardly new under the sun, but I doubt the average web user 
is very aware of how it operates.  Verisign's primary sin in all of  this 
is their hijacking of DNS requests to drive traffic (and profits) to their 
service, and the fact that this hijacking breaks services which relied on 
the previous DNS behavior.

Please surf safely.

--rt

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