How Referral Links Actually Know Who Sent You
You click a link in a YouTube description. A week later you buy the thing. The creator gets paid. Nobody typed your name into a form and no receipt was forwarded anywhere, so how did the payment find its way back to a video you watched on a different device seven days earlier? The answer is a handful of ordinary web technologies stacked on top of each other. None of them are exotic. All of them are things your browser does dozens of times a day without telling you. What happens in the half second after the click The link in the description usually doesRead More →




