
Technical Question... - veritas

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veritas
So a couple of days ago, TechCrunch profiled VideoCounter:
[http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/07/01/videocountercom-
count-v...](http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/07/01/videocountercom-count-views-
on-multiple-video-sites/)

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
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).

~~~
veritas
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.

