Patent ID: 8363544

Claim:
A method of determining quality rankings of user traffic transmitted over a communications network, the user traffic directed from at least one traffic producer Web site linked to the communications network to a plurality of traffic consumer Web sites, each of the plurality of traffic consumer websites linked to the communications network, comprising the steps of: a) establishing a plurality of references for the plurality of traffic consumers on the at least one Web site of the traffic producer, the plurality of references each including a link to a traffic quality intermediary and a unique identifier to identify a respective traffic consumer from other traffic consumers of the plurality of traffic consumers, the traffic quality intermediary linked to the communications network; b) directing, using a respective link, user traffic data received by the traffic quality intermediary, through the traffic quality intermediary, from the at least one traffic producer Web site to one or more of the plurality of traffic consumer Web sites, the user traffic data being associated with the user traffic directed from the at least one traffic producer, the user traffic based on requests for a reference on the at least one web site of the traffic producer, the requests transmitted from computers associated with users, the computers linked to the network, to the at least one web site of the traffic producer; and c) determining, at the traffic quality intermediary, a quality ranking of the user traffic of each of the traffic consumers based upon: i) a weighting of a plurality of traffic data parameters associated with the user traffic data received by the traffic quality intermediary, at least one of the traffic data parameters obtained from the requests transmitted from the computers of the users, and, ii) the unique identifier of the respective traffic consumer.