Yes and no. Advertisers want to know how well a particular program performs, even if it's by referral. When examining their performance in Google Analytics, and noticing that their conversion rate is atypical, they'll likely end up looking for traffic sources. Once they do that, they'll see the high number of visitors from news.ycombinator.com, and the mystery will be solved.

...or someone in the chain will benefit from saying "see how well our email campaign worked?".

But it did, didn't it? By sending that email that got x people to look at the page.

If it were a store having a sale, they would consider it a win if people shared the sale flyer and enticed more people to come.

Yea, I generally try to examine the URL before posting links on HN for that reason.

Hopefully they're smart enough to check the Referer header.

It appears Google Analytics isn't, by default at least: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/analytics-help-basic...