[wcfields]

I used to work for https://www.interpolls.com/ in 2007 so tech may has changed quite a bit but here's how the business worked then:

We were allowed 30kb of JS file to load which could (depending on the ad network) serve ~300kb of a Flash SWF file. We ran Cold Fusion hooks in the SWF to radio home to our JS file to trigger 1x1 pixels for 3rd party trackers. We scraped our raw Akamai HTTP request logs after the fact on a CRON job to create our reporting system. There was a small cluster of FreeBSD servers that crunched the HTTP request logs. Every mouse-over / click was registered via these pixel HTTP GETs. We had timers too that would trigger every few seconds. The reporting system probably had a 2-3 hour delay due to the immense amount of traffic we received.

We specialized in "polls" which were plain old HTML radio buttons overtop of the SWFs which after you answered gave you a quick answer and sometimes had digital takeaways in the popup answer window (Icons, Wallpapers, etc..)

At the time all of our ads were handmade, we had a design team and a programming team that would create these together and code them specifically to the clients request. By the time I left we had started to automate it into a drag+drop system for clients.

Sidenote: Biggest job screw up that I've ever done was not putting in the correct 3rd party tracking pixel into an 300x250 that ran for 1 day on AOL.com homepage. It ended up being fine since we got the results back for the typo from the raw logs, but it could have been a $200k mistake!