Understanding The Report

The table in this report illustrates the top 100 web sites that are benefiting from web bugs. This is based on a sample of 67131741 pages retrieved from 4432194 different sites.

The reader should note the following

• Domain: We track the domain doing the bugging, not the site. In this way, if sites A and sites B had, as an example, images served from banner ad servers called host_1.somedomain.com and host_2.somedomain.com, the domain somedomain.com will be credited with having bugged two different sites.

• Relative Traffic Weight: This is a cumulative sum of the weight of each bugged site. The weight of a bugged site originates from our referral report, and is a measure of how authorative a site is, based on the number of other sites that link to it. The idea is that the more authorative a site is, the more traffic it has. By calculating the cumulative sum of weights, we come much closer to ranking "buggers" by the amount of traffic they have bugged. This should have the effect of elevating the rank of buggers that focus on high traffic sites.

• Type of Bugs: In this column, we list all the different tag types that were found referencing the specified domain. The percentage represents the number of bugged sites that use the specified tag. Since a single site may use multiple tags, these percentages can and often do exceed 100%.

Also available is the Web Bug Site Count Report