Report Description

The Web Bug Report documents the usage of web bugs on the internet. What are web bugs? They are objects (images, iframes, etc.) that are imbedded on a web site that cause part of the web page to be retrieved from a completely different web site. In the process, this second web site gets to know that you visited the original web site. The most common web bugs are banner ads. Advertising agencies that have banner ads placed on a web site know pretty much all traffic that the web site gets.

Are Web Bugs Bad?

There isn't a clear answer to this question. To some people, they are. Others don't care. The issue is the potential abuse of information: the placement of a web bug on a page allows the "bugger" (e.g. the site hosting the banner ad) to know your IP address, the page that you visited, and can even further be correlated to cookie information that may be sent by your browser as part of the request to retrieve the page.

The Reports

We publish two different web bug reports, each showing slightly different information.

Bugged Site Count
This report counts the number of sites that have web bugs, identifies the domains doing the "bugging" (we'll call them "buggers"), and then orders the buggers in the report so that the biggest offenders show up at the top of the list.

Bugged Traffic Count
The counting of the number of sites, while useful, doesn't tell us who is bugging the majority of the traffic on the net, only who has bugged the most web sites. Some advertisers, however, will only take on clients with millions of page views per month. These types of advertisers may have relatively few sites, but because of the large amount of traffic served by these sites, may account for a large portion of internet traffic.

By weighing the bugged site by how authoritative it is (based on our Referral Report), we can make a very rough estimate of the relative amount of traffic bugged by each bugger.