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India's Secret Army Of Online Ad 'Clickers'
TI-99/4A's RULE writes "Just when I thought I'd heard everything, I just read that, according to The Times of India, there are hordes of people in India clicking pay per click ads for a share of the CPC earnings. Have we gone back to the dotcom boom days again where people are tossing money away on stuff like this? Or is this just a temporary blip, with paid-per action sites like CurrentCodes representing more of a norm in online marketing?"
It reminds me of a 1990s-era site called FreeRide which awarded "points" that were redeemable for prizes for visiting sponsor sites. It was even to the point that you could earn points for searching Google and other search engines, as they were even willing to pay per click back then.
Somehow, I don't think this is going to last very long. Anybody who's working on a Pay-Per-Click basis without a way to shut this kind of "unqualified lead" down is going to get wiped out very quickly...
Is it me, or isn't this one of those jobs that could further be outsourced, to um, I don't know, a script maybe?
Perhaps in India people are cheaper than a script sufficeintly sophisticated to slip thru the "Click Protection" of PPC advertisers.
Mind you Overtures' Click Protection leaves a lot to desired.
An Indian advertising executive quoted in the article feels that this practice of making a lot of money clicking on ads is unethical. Why? The people are being paid to do exactly what they are doing. The ones interviewed for this article were not using any kind of script or other automated click simulator. This is the downside of massive, untargeted advertising. You never know who you're going to reach or if your message is the slightest bit effective.
Not really. The beauty of doing it from home is the clicks are distributed, the greatness of using people is their inherant unpredictability - they will click through. COmpanies that pay-per-click use sophisticated analysis to work out what is a script (and happily withhold payment if they think one is being used) - if you work out a truely undpredictable script that is intuitive enough to click through or face 'challenges' deliberately put in ads, and implement this on a wide range of IPs then you will have made millions and broken internet advertising as we know it!
"If they aren't smart enough to write a little script to do it for them, I'm less worried about my job being offshored."
Did you consider it might be cheaper to hire people to click the ads than to contract a company to write such a script? Its kinda like how the American military often threw up their arms after destroying various Vietnamese infrastructure during that conflict. They'd blow up a bridge, only to find it reconstructed a few days labor thanks to what the Pentagon defined as "ant labor." The Western business-minded viewpoint would factor in contracts, heavy industry, materials, and all the like into costs, whereas a more simple society would just get a ton of unskilled workers out there to assemble the project (instead of relying on earth moving equipment). Or maybe a better example would be the Minnonites and the Amish in terms of barn raisings.
"Right now, somewhere in this world, Scott Baio is plowing a woman he doesn't love," - Peter Griffin, *Family Guy*
the article mentions that you have to stay on the page for ~60 seconds.
there's no place like ~
...those Ad people think their ads really are reaching people.
Someone put a black hole in my pocket and now I'm broke.
Or a virus. "Borrow" millions of PC's to click through ads and sell spam relays on the side.
A fine is a tax you pay for doing wrong and a tax is a fine you pay for doing all right.
I mean, I buy stuff, too, and the Sunday inserts are a great way to check prices on stuff, and see what's generally on sale or otherwise discounted.
I'm as anti-advertising as the next guy, but this is the best kind of advertising -- I can opt-in if I want to, they print prices, have pictures, you can comparison shop on a lot of things, no cookies, spyware, sales associates or other annoyances.
If only all commerce was this enjoyable.
My wife is one of those coupon clippers, she manages to save about $30.00 a month for maybe an hours work total. That's not bad.
Hell I even go through the techie adds, Best Buy, CompUSA, Circuit City, et. al. to see if they have any good deals for the week. I've picked up many a computer game for $30 bucks that's retailling at the other outlets for $40 or more. So don't discount the sunday paper.
Sir, there is a dragon outside with an armful of armor. He's inquiring if we offer free refills.
EXACTLY!
Funny how this follows on so close to the article about the BBC on-demand video experiment. The issue is the same, people are trying to impose old, outdated print media advertising concepts onto the Internet.
Click-throughs are (IMHO) a better measure of ad effectiveness than are the magazine subscription numbers (or Neilson ratings) by a long shot, but click-throughs are not perfect. What *IS* perfect is to measure how many people actually BUY the product being advertised.
This is conceptually quite easy to do. With each ad needs to come some sort of incentive, either to buy the product right now, while viewing the ad, or some sort of unique coupon number than will (for example) entitle the bearer to a discount when buying the product later. Even the print and TV advertisers figured this one out years ago. The Internet makes it much easier.
Stop measuring click-throughs and start measuring buy-throughs.
When I was in India (admittedly, 10 years ago) there were people crouching in the middle of the street painting the yellow lines. Scared the hell out of me, considering how my taxi driver was driving.
I guess it was cheaper than buying a truck with a paint brush attached.
Milo
I earned about $250 worth of certificates from FreeRide.com, most of which were Amazon or CDNow certificates. Pretty much everyone in my office did it, we were that bored. It was how we started each morning.
/Still wishing I hadn't used my real e-mail address to sign up for FreeRide...
Of course toward the end it got worse and worse, but they never did fix some security 'problems' that would let you get multiple clicks per ad. The system was setup to only allow you ~10 ad clicks per day in the main section, but depending on how fast a person could click, you could get from 2-50 + clicks registered off the right banners, preferably 10-point ones. You could get a $20 cert in a matter of days.
Of course that's probably why they went under... I still don't get how they really made money in the first place. I doubt they ever turned anything resembling a profit.