The weather service is a subsidiary of Massachusetts-based WSI Corp., which gathers and sells weather data. More damaging was the realization that visitors were bypassing Intellicast's ad banners. Bill Mechanic, division manager of business development for Intellicast, said advertisers typically set goals for the number of impressions, or ad views, they want per month. For example, a computer firm in the Boston area wants their ads to appear 50,000 times in the month of April. This information is gathered by looking at server logs, which tell what pages, and subsequently, what ads, are projected.
Net surfers have their own reasons for skipping ads.
The banners are merely one more large graphics file that a dial-up connection has to choke over in the process of download a Web page. Bypassing an ad or logo saves time. It also preserves privacy. Images on sites such as AltaVista, for example, also hide cookies from Web ad agency DoubleClick. Programs such as WebFilter and Internet Junkbuster , a set of resources that route URL requests through proxy servers run by Internet service providers, are not affected by procedures like the one written by Intellicast.