The Internet has become a mainstream, multibillion dollar advertising channel. The popularity mechanisms that rule traditional advertising economics also rule online advertising, but traditional systems for measuring ad exposure are of little value. Even a trusted host site can generate statistics that don't correspond to real usage.
Advertisers and auditing companies haven't adopted a standard technique to accurately measure the number of visits a site receives and hence the advertising exposure. A proposed framework based on hash chains minimizes the overhead associated with the additional communication required to implement a counting technique. Testing in a prototype implementation indicates that the framework also guarantees security and nonrepudiation of the produced proof of visits.