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Google's Fraud Squad Battles Phantom Clicks
An anonymous reader writes "It's an open secret that low cost workers in India, China and other countries are hired to boost traffic for online ads by clicking on text links, banners etc. Internet marketers facing high advertising fees on search networks like Google are becoming increasingly concerned about this form of online fraud. This problem has reached a critical stage and even Google recognizes that it has been the target of individuals and entities "using some of the most advanced spam techniques for years". A Google spokesperson said the company has "applied what we have learned with search to the click fraud problem and employed a dedicated team and proprietary technology to analyse clicks.""
> It's an open secret that low cost workers in India, China and other countries
> are hired to boost traffic for online ads by clicking on text links, banners etc.
That's like 'common knowledge', right?
Anyway, I click on lots of lots of ads. The ones that make it through AdBlock, anyway. Shortly before I add them to my block list. I do hope I'm not skewing anyone's statistics. I'd hate for commercial websites to suffer.
Thanks for the link to Google.
Does anyone have a mirror just in case?
------
beware he who would deny you access to information, for in his mind he dreams himself your master
Imagine a worm that infects machines that, instead of being an open email spam relay, surfs ad-heavy sites and simulates webclicks.
using some of the most advanced spam techniques for year
Low cost Indian workers?? I guess Nike must be using the latest in shoe manufacturing technology, too, then.
I use it for work... :)
All the torrents you could want.
I just read right past them now. I can't think of the last time I actually paid attention to or read an ad.
Outsourcing spam? Spam can't even stay domestic nowadays?
Don't click that next button! It's a trap!
Google has a golden opportunity to avoid being snipped. Please deliver 40,000 advertising clicks now, or we will be forced to go through with our operation.
Best regards,
419
"proprietary technology"
NOoooooo!!!! Not you google!
j/k
1. Submit a story about the fraud website to /.. Thanks to the lame lameness filter, it makes its way as news. *ducks*
/.ers click on the link.
2. Zillions of
3. Profit!
Okay, agreed that the fraud website goes down for a while....
Hopefully they've gotten that damn thing at least a few times.. he's always too quick for me
--Less Thinkin', More Drinkin'...
When people talk about "proprietary" or "patented" technology, do they think it will actually make their product look better?
I wonder it they would consider outsourcing to the United States since we have so many unemployed tech workers. What is the rate of pay anyway.
I have experience with this too... iWon!
Simple, just block out all those clicks from the same companies in India and China, etc. There has got to be an obvious pattern in there somewhere that is easily discernible.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Kind of like "Common Sense" which isn't very good - how about "Good Sense"?
Another off-shore resource. I wonder how many companies suddenly like this particular activity outside the US?
Suddenly, it seems karma comes into play: there is balance & harmony in the universe.
Any way we can match up the companies who are off-shoring their regular work with bulk clicking?
Last time I used google adwords, I noticed that they had a mechanism where ads that got clicked on a lot got some sort of karma points. So if you click on your competitors ads, it will cost them money, but maybe also help their ad karma. I don't know the specifics about this. Maybe it is a google secret. Does anyone else know more? My guess is the cost per click hurts a lot more than the karma gained in most cases.
Not that there's anything new about extending the non-meat product uses of spam, but I'm not sure it really applies to this. Most spam involves pushing your message at people in an automated (and annoying) way. This is about people sucking down advertising in an automated way. It's gaming the system to make money fast, annoying to companies like Google, but I don't see that it has the central quality of spam: in your face, over and over and over...
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Why would someone hire people to click banners when you could automate it?
You just need a bit of programming to parse webpages looking for Google (or other companies' ads).
Add some ip-spoofing (easy if the destination web server runs Windows) and make the program distribute clicks using some kind of probability distribution (for instance, a Gauss distribution), and it will look perfectly legal.
Indeed, if you find any ads company that still pays per click, and set some of those banners in a site of yours, you could earn a lot of money.
I described deeply this procedure in 1999 in a paper called Simulating hits to a HTTP server. Sadly, it is only in Catalan (if you have interest, e-mail me and I'll try to translate it for you).
At first glance I thought the title read: 'Google's Fraud Squad Battles Phantom Chicks'
I must be new here.
had dealt with this phantom menace instead of the other one.
I want to drag this out as long as possible. Bring me my protractor.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
It doesn't say who is paying whom for the clicks or where the clicked on links appear or who's the sucker or who's paying the people to click for bucks.
the answer to one of the three cases in there is simple...the cost-per-click payment model is eventually going to go away...what's gonna replace it? i dunno...if i knew that, i could probably be a marketing exec for google...
seriously though...this doesn't solve the problem of judging how popular a link it, by how much traffic it gets (since much of the traffic can be false), but it does solve the "drive-by-clicking" technique that can cost companies money...
"Facts are meaningless. You could use facts to prove anything that's even remotely true." - Homer Simpson
Here's an idea. Don't charge per click but per sale generated. The advertizer is happy, because he gets what he pays for. Google is happy, because the customer pays for what they get. There wouldn't be any idea in boosting up the click rate, and fraud would be virtually impossible.
Underholdning.info
Really, I've always thought that ad programs that pay per click were kind of stupid. The way to go is really affiliate programs. It makes perfect sense, don't pay people when their site brings people to your site, that's not where you get the money, pay people when their site brings people to your site and they buy something. Granted, this isn't a silver bullet because not all people that advertise are selling a product (or aren't selling one through their site), but for a lot of companies it just makes sense.
...they were hinted that something fishy was going on the moment someone purportedly clicked on a banner ad.
"Hey, someone just punched the monkey!"
"Foul play!"
"Call the Feds!"
Ever hear of LWP?
What incentive does Google have to seriously reduce this type of fraud? The more clickthru's, the more they get paid!
What incentive does the spammer have to conduct this type of deceit? Are they trying to boost ad costs of rivals? Follow the money. The linked news article does a piss poor job of explaining the issues.
Wow, thats the first part of the combination for my luggage!
*almost Quote from SpaceBalls, the movie*
Comment removed based on user account deletion
" In certain sectors, such as travel, legal advice and gaming, the cost can reach several dollars per click.
Step 1: scrap my free software based www site.
Step 2: welcome to my FPS-holidays-for-lawyers website!
Step 3: Profit!!
Oxford Dictionaries Online
No doubt fradusters will keep dreaming up more innovative schemes to get this done. I wonder if the Google API could be used towards this goal or in fighting it. Perhaps by setting up a Google Alert to search for fraud schemers, the good guys can stay a step ahead.
I am pretty sure you've noticed those 'nexteg' taxt ad on google that seems to pop up on everything you serach.
A guy you've never met walks up to you, extends his hand and says "Hi. I'm George. I work for Google's Anti-Click Fraud Squad".
What do you do?
a. Say "Excuse me" and quickly go find Malcolm, the accountant with halitosis you avoided earlier.
b. Poke George in the eye.
c. Retire to the kitchen for another beer.
d. Not lose any sleep that night over George's revelations as to how Ad-Fraud denies corporations valuable profits.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
A significant number of ecommerce ad sites only do business with certain countries, and it seems like a simple and somewhat effective solution is to allow the company to opt not to pay for or receive traffic from countries outside their sales zone. In other words, a reverse ad block based on the visitor's IP address.
I work with a mail order business which does zero orders to third world countries like India, and it's no skin off our back of we were to simply "ban" our ads from India.
Go ahead! Slashdot them! That will teach them to steal ad revenues!
You insensitive clod!
I didn't think the pay rate would be high enough to make any money by employing people to look at these ads, I mean if you automated it then it might be profitable,
Anyway, more worrying about this scheme would be false positives meaning some people were getting less ad money than they were entitled to.
Moving off topic (so stop reading now if that bothers you), there's a lot of extensions for Firefox and Mozilla (and probably other apps - not looked) that do things with Gmail including provide a new notification icon in your toolbar (weblogs.mozillazine.org/doron/), upload contents of a Mozilla, Thunderbird or any other mailer that uses the standard mbox format and probably tools to download Gmail and serve it to a regular mail client.
Currently these methods are unsupported by Google - in fact some violate their terms of service. It'd be good to see Google to make some of these extensions official and make Firefox the number one Gmail browser, I mean MS do this with Hotmail in Outlook Express and as Firefox uses Google as a default search engine then they don't have to worry as much about an IE service pack resetting the browsers default home and search pages to MSN.
Gmail users - you have a feedback option - in the top right click on help. In the new page there should be an option down the left for feedback.
Since trying to defeat technology is a never ending race that only costs people more in the long run; do away with non-revenue generating click thru payments.
Doesn't Amazon do this?
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
Why not put fricking lasers on the fricking pigeons and have a fricking death squad? If they can run a search engine like google they can massacre innocent people too dumb to ignore an advert
I like muppets.
Wow, just like what I do at work everyday right here in US, Surfing the web and get paid.
Seems Google has a kind of dilemma. On the one hand, they want to avoid all automated querying since it undermines their marketing model and perceived advertiser value. On the other, they want to build up automated third-party services (such as TouchGraph GoogleBrowser or GoogleAlert, both big users of the Google APIs). How are they ever going to be able to push advertising alongside automated queries if they can't even be sure that click throughs on normal queries aren't being faked? Or are they resigned to a pure pay-for-query model?
I don't make much from my Google ads, but it's fun to watch the stats. So when my stats tripled -- views, clicks, and cash -- at the start of May, I sent Google a note. No way did I want to be accused of click fraud, that $10 a month (oops, I shouldn't tell you that) takes the place of my dearly-departed CDNow affiliate kickbacks!
I got a nice form letter suggesting I check my referrer logs, but basically brushing me off. Understandable, if frustrating. What did I want them to do, say "OMFG WERE TOAST!"?
Strangely, though, the bump lasted exactly a week. May 1-7 had triple volume or more, then the stats settled down to exactly the pattern they've followed since the site's subject dropped off the face of the planet. I don't know if Google found the problem and fixed it, or if perhaps they were giving me catch-up credit for some previous bug.
All in all, though, they still look like the Good Guys. Hope it can last longer than CDNow.
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
Easy to avoid in the short term.
As click generators simply read a page and then call the URL it would not be unheard of to change the add to redirect to another url on the mouseover event thus making the click generators at least have to rewrite their scam software.
Ok, that wasn't fair . . . in all seriousness, this would devalue google's most significant revenue source by increasing the number of clickthroughs that happen per dollar revenue for the companies that pay for the ads. The bid price for clickthrough ads would invariably go down.
I'm surprised that Google hasn't been working on this problem harder, because if I remember from the article correctly, over 90% of google's revenue comes from ads. If Google fails to correct this problem, their whole business model may be destroyed (or at least crippled) by this problem.
(So yes, you can mod this redundant :) )
It is _exceptional_ for me to click adverts at the time. It would be equivalent to me seeing an advert on TV, and deciding to stop what I was doing and go find more information on that product.
Obviously, if I'm Googling for something and a paid link appears referring to what I'm looking for, I'll probably click that, but that's about it. If I see an advert that intruiges, I'll make a mental note to go look into it later.
Another example; adverts also affect future decisions. For example, my personal belongings insurance (spot the guy stuck in rented accomodation) was coming up for renewal. I remembered seeing an advert for a company (Endsleigh), and looked into that company. This company, which I hadn't found when initially looking for insurance, about halved my premiums and the cover suits me better. The thing is though, I'd seen the advert about 2 months before...
Advertisers need to get over this idea of adverts being an instant draw, they're not, and never have been...
Well I think we should all care since quite a bit of the net is driven by ads. So either come up with a new model or quit your trolling.
Not everything is analogous to cars. Car analogies rarely work.
But that's me.
--- Ban humanity.
Maybe they'll finally find out that advertising really does not generate any sales. I know I have never bought anything because of an ad.
It's an open secret that low cost workers in India, China and other countries are hired to boost traffic for online ads by clicking on text links, banners etc.
Hard references, please! If you don't have any, then we know this is an urban legend. The big flaw in this theory is that it would be much cheaper and simpler to simply write a little program to send the HTTP requests than to have people clicking on links. It would be like paying people to copy text off of web pages when you could just print it out instead.
"proprietary" and "patented" simply means "we have something nobody else has"
At what point do all these stupid marketers wake up and say 'Oh, gee... the internet was not created to be a worldwide marketplace, it was created to share information and we attempted to usurp it. Maybe we should have thought of that before we stuck our greedy fists into a network we didn't understand.'
I couldn't a shit less about the problems all these stupid marketers face. The Internet is meant to share information, it's not meant to be a global market. That's the reason you have all these problems with spam and abuse of the traditional marketing mechanisms - it's a system to share information with minimal checks and balances.
Alito: A vote for Alito is a punch in the eye to put that bitch back in her place!
I wonder if they've seen any pattern of people clicking through from "liberal" newspaper websites to the RNC "donate money" AdSense ad, and not donating.
Not that I would do anything like that, unless I were bored or wanted to see if the RNC had changed the donation page lately or anything.
Outsourcing would really work here! Only instead of outsourcing link clickers, perhaps they should outsource product buyers.
click ! click ! [...] click !
Why would it be worthwhile having people click adverts when it would be trivial to knock up a bot to trawl the web and 'click' them instead -- hugely faster? I can't believe the pay can be so low as to make it worthwhile.
[ UNSIGNED NOT NULL ]
It's also an open secret that a number of Google Advertisers have had their accounts suspended and payments withheld because of "Fraudulent Clicks" on a website. Google refuse to disclose any details of what they think is causing the issue when this happens - I've been warned by Google about "violations of the Acceptable Use Policy" with absolutely no other detail as to what I'm supposed to have done. Any queries are met with canned replies. (They would not actually be able to get away with this in the UK or many other European countires due to the Data Protection Act and similar - they can be forced to give up any information they hold)
They are very much throwing the baby out with the bathwater -- it's perfectly possible to kill a rivals cash flow if they're using Google simply by running a bot to click on all the ads on their site. (I think this is what happened in my case) Of course, as Google present no evidence you can't then sue your rival.
I would immediately switch to some other advertising network if there was one available for smaller (~8-9 million hits a month) web sites in the UK. Sadly, there isn't - yet.
"Allow me to introduce myself. I'm Inspector Fox of the Google Search Police, Fraud division, Special Click Squad."
It works!
My approach to advertising is very black & white:
1. Corporations rip us off by lying to us through advertisements. If someone rips off the corporations with some ingenuity and stays within the law then good luck to them with my blessing.
2. I turn on my TV, there's adverts. I turn on my radio, there's adverts. I read a magazine or newspaper, there's adverts. I buy a DVD and at the beginning there's trailers (=adverts). Hell, I even fill my car up at the petrol station and if I don't look at the TV screen overhead playing adverts at me, I stare down at the petrol pump nozzle and on the 3" diameter circle on the top, there's an... wait for it... advert (usually for a bar of chocolate).
Hey, I'm a capitalist scum consumer just like the rest of you but if my girlfriend went on at me as much as advertisements do, I'd have left her by now.
My greatest fear is not death but arriving at the gates of Heaven only to see a "Sponsored by Coca Cola sign on them."
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
Link
they dont even try to hide their involvment
You pay for location (context, which page or time of day for tv or radio) and you pay for the time that you're in, one day costs x, a week of newspaper ads costs x * ???.
You don't pay extra by how many newspapers are sold that day. You might pay extra for a more popular newspaper or their most popular day of the week. But if there is a bumper issue and reprint, they don't go back to their advertisers and ask them to shell out more, do they? But you don't get any guarrantee that a single reader will actually see or even read your ad. And you sure as hell don't get charged each time a reader rings your ad with a highlighter.
I think Google could easily switch to this model and then all the "fraud" clicks would mean nothing.
-- it must be true, it's on the internet.
I was under the impession internet ads didn't pay that much anymore.
That's because you only get paid if someone clicks on the ad. Most people don't, so you have to run 20 or so ads to get one paying click. Thus showing ads in and of itself doesn't pay much anymore.
After all, they don't really buy anything, do they?
Desireable search terms can go for $0.45/click. If you have a website that forwards clicks to google, you get a share of the revenue, which is what is driving the fraud.
One way to combat would be to compare the search rate from the website to the total hits on the website compare that ratio to hits on the google main page or to other affiliates. If 90% of the people hvisiting the website click on the ad link, it would be kind of suspicious.
In general, people seem to be dismissing both the problem of search fraud and the technology used to fight it. I spent a little time working in the anti-fraud division of one of google's competitors and its actually pretty interesting. One of the big problems is that most small-ish companies have advertising budgets and (and others) allow you to set a maximum amount you're willing to pay per day|month|year. Mr. Evil Competitor comes along and pays someone to click through links until you get to your limit, your link drops out of the running, and Mr. Evil Competitor is now the top paid link without paying as much for it as you were willing to.
Note that this means that the ad serving company (google, overture, whatever) is loosing a lot of potential revenue to keep up the integrity of their programs. As for the tech behind it, it is a constant battle with ever more sophisticated methods of fraud and detection that I'm sure it light-years beyond what I worked on a couple of years ago.
Google would profit from but doesn't want fraud.
Advertisers don't care about clicks. They care about conversions. Advertisers want people to come to their site and then open the wallet. A conversion is somebody that came to the site and then bought something. Advertisers measure the success of the campain by the net profit. That means they track how many people converted and then figure out how much a click is worth to them statistically. If a campaign was sucessful, they want to continue the campaign. In the best case for Google, they want to expand the campaign or would be willing to pay more for the campaign.
While it might be in Google's short term interest to have fraudulent clicks, it is not in their long term interest. They will lose advertisers who have to pay for fake clicks because the advertisers are tracking it.
I've been saying this for years, and I'll say it again.
The "per click" is flawed. I don't click... almost never do. I'm at a site to read it's content. Not just link jump from site to site.
If I see something of interest, I'll note the URL in my head and check it out later.
Think TV Ads or Newspaper Ads:
I don't leave my favorite show to run off to the store??? Nor do I stop reading the Newspaper column to buy that new car at that low low price...
It doesn't work that way.
Ads should be sold on a number of eyeballs flat rate fee, and that's it. The whole "per click" notion is flawed...
Anyhow... we block ads because they are obtrusive and annoying!! What happened to the superbowl ads? Why doesn't soemone try and make some for the internet. Fun and Entertaining... something we'll WANT to watch? Not so we click, but so we remember your name and url....
There's probably a lot of money to be made for the person who can finally get this right.
www.slightlycrewed.com - Because aren't we all?
So I clicked on the link in the article to a page called google.com, and I have to say this site sucks. It looks like a 5 year old wrote the HTML. I guess it is a search engine or something, but come on, who would use a search engine that looks like that? I think I'll stick with Yahoo and Alta-Vista. All their pretty graphics and informative links on the front page mean I'm sure to get better search results than on this google thing. Please! This google thing will be bankrupt in a couple of months!
Google ads can get very expensive. A dollar to several dollars PER CLICK. Would you like to do the math here?
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
There are worms out there that make computers dial expensive premium phone services (phone sex and the like) using their modems. This is a godsend to the guys running phone sex lines... in the past, they had to (and did) break into phone line distribution boxes and install small electronic diallers (or pay a phone company repair guy to do this). Now they can just spread these things from the comfort of their own home. I still have a modem in my computer (for faxing stuff), but the phone line is disconnected when not in use. A normal virus might send my personal data (which is encrypted anyway), or trash my hard drive (which is properly backed-up), but this stuff might run up a god-awful phone bill. And no, phone companies will not refund any of it; they did not even do so in cases where rogue diallers were installed on people's phone lines.
I wouldn't be surprised if the operators of certain sites (usually with the more obnoxious and dubious ads) would stoop to such methods to boost their income from ads.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
To be fair, I'm staring at a little stuffed boxing monkey that Treeloot.com sent me in 2000 from punching the monkey. At least *I* got something out of the deal.
Thank you, Venture Capital!
--- What
I'd ask the man for a job.
Working for Google... on the fraud team. That actually sounds very, very interesting.
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0.45?
:P
heh, we frequently hit ads at several dollars per click.
Gone are the days of $1200/check though, damn google!
(in case of slashdotting)
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Tsunami -- You can't bring a good wave down!
Maybe this would account for why I have 8 banner clicks and no revenues for them. I didn't generate any of those and I was actually quite surprised to see 8 in one day. Maybe their software is a little TOO aggressive?
Click here or a puppy gets stomped!
... that's what I've read. Sounded like a cool fight to me, but then I realized...
Can you give, say, five examples of a corporation lying to you through ads? Advertising is extremely regulated--at least in the US. Corporations cannot, in fact, tell lies in ads here. So I'd love for you to cite some specific examples of having been explicitly lied to by advertisements. And please be specific. I am honestly curious about your perceptions.
After looking down and realizing that the t-shirt I'm wearing is from a nicely failed website from back then, I've got to agree. All that VC floating around was wonderful.. too bad it dried up before I could really take advantage of it...
--Less Thinkin', More Drinkin'...
If cheap labor is mindly clicking on google ads, doesn't google alone benefit?
> That is, unless Microsoft talks about proprietary ... jackasses
Microsoft has something nobody else has too: 95% desktop market share.
Could someone explain me why US person clicking on the advertisement is good on the global Internet, while Indian person clicking on the same link is fraud?
I have not seen anywhere "White American Males Only" on that advertisements.
People may be surprised to learn that this type of thing goes on in most countries, in fact, and not only for Google results and ads, but also for some of the smaller PTC search engines.
The industry is one where you are encouraged to get paid to "read" your emails, but the only way these programs earn their money is to advertise for PTC search engines and Google results, and most people are encouraged (by the programs) to click on the Google links.
Here's a link to one: http://snipurl.com/7vwc/
You may want to sign-up and check it out.
If cheap labour is clicking on ads, then it is ads on third party websites where the website owners are getting a nice cut per click (up to $1.50+ a click in some cases).
A make it a point myself to click on advertisements now and then on websites that I like (like slashdot). I see it as my way of "paying back". Am I more likely to buy something that I click on? Not more likely than I am to buy something where I see a tv advertisement.
While google may be trying, I know Overture (aka Yahoo) makes a half hearted attempt to protect its customers. Awhile back I had an interesting conversation with them concerning their click protection such as it is.
In a conclusion Overture admits they have no mechanism to test your own url's (unlike Google's adwords program) and first recommends "cutting and pasting" the url of your competetors into the location field. However when it is pointed out this is inadequate they back track and then recommend to "click once" and then bookmark it. Yeah right!
There a very legitimate reasons to click on competitor ads as a way to see what they are offering, the methods used (ie are they link to specific product pages or predefined search string, etc. I believe that their failure to do so is gross negligence at best and deceptive and fraudulent at worst.
The claim to be looking at "20 to 50 different data point" but I content they are not trying very hard.
Personal pension schemes that promised better returns than they actually did...
Adverts for loans and car insurances that use glitzy imagery to divert you from the small subtext "they have to say" due to government regulation...
A racist Pepsi advert that portrays an Indian man as an elephant trainer - how cliched is that? - and even uses a fake Indian accent to his English...
Cosmetics that blatantly do not deliver the "age protection" they claim to...
If I looked more carefully I could find more examples but I genuinely avoid as much advertising as possible.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
You could always change it to "Chixie Dicks" and get some of that hot tranny revenue.
Does anyone know if it would be illegal to write a plugin that would automatically click the links on all popup pages, images of the generic ad size, and other frequent locations for ads? Then, the program would use idle bandwidth to just surf around on those pages and just trash the output? Ideally, it would have to wait some semi random amount of time say between 5 sec and 2 min before going on to a link (perhaps base it on the size of the page?). I'm sure this would be much more difficult to detect than having a large group of people from one area just click the same links over and over, and if you have a more spontaneous time you might not get detected as a bot. Another useful feature for this plugin would be to have it attempt to find products to ad to the shopping cart. (My understanding is that ad companies also collect this information). And if someone wrote a virus to add this code to IE through one of the numerous exploits, I don't think any company would be paying for Internet advertisements.
in conjunction with what that article says.
you can click-bomb out other advertisers (killing their daily limits by 1am) so that your super cheapo ad is displayed at the top of your keywords.
At the same time you can get the revenue for that, but I would think that it might look a little fishy if you did that.
However, clickbombing is really the new issue.. more so that this.
anime+manga together at last.. in real time.
The "clickers" are pretending to come from different IP addresses to seem distinct. The connection requires some to-and-fro negotiation, most of the "fro" will get lost but with predictable sequence numbers the clicker can guess what the data they never received was.
I saw "Phantom Cliques" and thought it had something to do with Orkut.
Here I thought that Google was battling phantom chicks. That would be a cool job, sort of like being a Ghostbuster without having to deal with Elder Gods all the time.
That's "Mr. Soulless Automaton" to you, Bub.
"We sell to people of all races but ship only to addresses in the United States of America and Canada." Delaying dealing with dozens of countries' import laws isn't racism now, is it? How would you go about going through all the effort of going international the day your company's web store opens?
It's not like Google hasn't participated in some fraud of their own. I used to have their ads on my web sites. After my account got to just over a grand, they decided that I had generated false clicks and cut me off. Quite patently untrue, but rather hard to prove. Of course they can't share any evidence, because it would reveal their "proprietary calculation scheme". Scheme is right . . .
funny munging
Yes, push-style advertising will eventually go the way of push-style web pages. Remember channels?
I find commercial radio unlistenable, and always mute or skip TV ads (I can't recall ever purchasing a product based on a TV ad I saw). I also browse the web with an ad blocker because (1), the ads I saw were invariably for something I had no interest in purchasing at that time, or were not relevant to my location, and (2), the colours, animation, and extra windows were too distracting.
Of course this poses a problem for providers of content that are unable to link their content to highly-relevant ads, which is just about everything except for search and reviews. Subscriptions are usually too coarse-grained, so nanopayments may be the ultimate solution. Maybe also a way for companies to pay for highly-regarded "what's new", "where to buy", and review editorial in a way that avoids conflicts of interest.
The problem isn that it's Indians, and not Americans, that are clicking on the link. The concept of fraud comes from employees specifically paid to click on specific advertisements, with no intention of purchasing anything. The original intention of both Google and the advertisers was to attract legitimate potential business transactions. Not to create an industry that skews statistics without purchasing anything.
I believe that Indians and other non-US countries were mentioned only to explain how this could become a profitable niche at all. Do you comprehend now?
Looks good for your age..
I think things would be different if your TV remote had a "More Info" or even a "Buy Now" button on it.
If you saw an ad for beer or light bulbs or toilet paper, you might make a mental note to buy some later, but if you could hit a button to have it delivered immediately from the local store, I'm sure many people would do so.
Without phantom chicks, slashdotters would never even have the hope of getting a chick! We like to pretend, that for a split second, some hot chick is really saying, "Hey there big boy!"
Without your link to Google in your posting, I *never* would have found it.
OBTW, taking the time to link Google makes me rate you simian. At best.
Nu-uh.
Never confuse volume with power.
TCP/IP requires a handshake. Spoofing your IP only works if the communication only needs to go one way.
The best you can do with TCP/IP spoofing is a DDoS attack.
No server that uses TCP/IP is going to respond to a request unless the handshake was successful and a connection is established.
Ben
Work Safe Porn
RELIVANCE and HONESTY. So many sites just slather any and every ad they can get. Well this has two problems: First, most of the ads are just for shit I don't want. I have no intrest in it, so I just start filtering the ads out. Second, and probably more importantly, so many of the ads are scam-like in nature. Punch the money and win, you have a waiting message, block popups (in a popup ad), etc.
/. once and a while) but only on Google have I gone straight to buying, and I've done so on many occasions. Reason is that the Google ads are completely relivant to what I want, so when I'm in buy mode, they instantly provide me with places selling what I'm interested in.
Well with Google's ads, espically the ones on Google itself, I find them highly relivant and honest. When I search for something, a list of companies that want to sell me that thing pop up on the right hand side. In fact, that's how I find shops to buy things, quite frequently.
I wanted a Bogen tripod. I had used them, and was quite happy with the quality. Problem: I do not know where one gets Bogen tripods. So I use Google. On the left was informational links, such as Bogen's own site, on the right was a whole list of pro video shops happy to sell me Bogen tripods. I browsed a couple shops, chose one, and bought the tripod.
Google holds the record for being the only ad provider that I've ever clicked through and immediatly bought something. Others I've clicked on for intrest (I do from
Anyone wanna bet their proprietary technology is an Indian IP list?
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
"several dollars"?
I happen to know, for a fact, that on certain Google adwords, the average CPC is OVER $35.
S
Industry leaders in advertising have been dealing with this problem for eons. DoubleClick (which shouldn't be as much an enemy of /. as it often seems to be) has spent a lot of time making the best-of-industry algorithms for weening bad clicks out of their reporting data to make CPC pricing keep working.
often advertisers don't necessarily lie but rather manipulate through sub-conscious phrases, incomplete truths, and meaningless words. think of many famous advertising campaigns (soda comes to mind) and it's just kind of empty propaganda.
there's a website called adbusters which is very interesting.
The question is.. who pays for these website clickers? The only people benefitting from these fraud clicks on google ads is google itself. (am I missing something here?)
So then why is google concerned about that? oh I forgot.... must be fair buisness and all... :)
I did some work detecting automated clicking a few years back. One thing to check for is if a large ammount of your traffic comes from open proxies - one computer running the autoclick program can hit many open proxies and tell them all to request a page. Telling if IPs are open proxies is not so hard as it can be tested emperically. Further, large ISPs (AOL, say) have many proxy servers which are (intentionally) open to their users (or at least they were years back - maybe not now) - thus one AOL account can start hitting all those servers making it look like the clicks are coming from all over.
Certainly there were obvious cases of autoclicking way back then, which were easy to detect. I imagine it has become more interesting now.
__________________________________________
a war on terrorism? How can we end a war on a method?
fart.
Michael Loves Me!
not difficult to script a winrunner script to do the clicking. no need for the low cost workers there.
And is the proprietary technology to combat these Indian and Chinese clickers being developed in India and China? (pure speculation, of course)
It's "Offshoring, the Next Generation". Pay them to hack and pay them to counter-hack.
It's all part of "Plan W".Soon, they'll have enough money to BUY things on Google with all the money we gave them and all will be right in the world.
sorta.
Wouldn't it be incredibly easy, and much more efficient, to automate this process?
...including Sourceforge, Slashdot, Freshmeat and others OSDN. I often click them. Guess why.
Some mozilla plugin to do it automagically on the backgrounded tab would come handy.
There you are, staring at me again.
About 4 years ago groups of people were defrauding "paid to surf" companies such as AllAdvantage and Paid2Surf. One of these groups was SoAngels. I was a part of this group and we coded programs that used gigantic lists of proxies to emulate clicks or views on ad banners. With a lot of the new technology though, this type of "cheating" died out. Most companies now check the origin of click (Country) to see if most of your traffic is from outside the United States (a typical red flag for cheating considering most proxies are offshore). Companies also check views to clicks ratio and compare it to the average that other webmasters have. If emulated properly using Winsock controls, it is difficult to tell that the emulated click isn't legit/real. If Google implements the above, only people with gigantic lists of USA/UK proxies that don't have "proxy" or another dead giveaway in the hostname can get around this. Timestamps also work well. If an insane amount of clicks come in a relatively short period of time, then flag the account. For the brilliant minds that run Google, this should be a cakewalk.
A compromised machine loaded a web bug through over a thousand proxies. I wrote it up here:
4 -M ay/008043.php
http://www.dshield.org/pipermail/intrusions/200
They should make up their bloody minds!
Oh well, what the hell...
Let's see...white people who only want to sell products to other white people
OK, you win. Add Mexico to the list, as NAFTA makes some of the issues slightly easier to handle.
Maybe you can enlighten me as to why a company would [cut off large foreign markets], other than hatred of "the other"?
Because businesses who ship to foreign countries have to know the foreign countries' import laws, and a small business would obviously have trouble with 200 sets of laws, each hideously complex. Having a consultant handle customs issues costs money, which small businesses often don't have.
Because international shipping of individual units costs money, and a bulk importer in the destination country could probably get the product from the manufacturer to the end users more efficiently than a small business could.
In other words, there exists at least one point in the life of a small business where it can maximize profit by limiting the global extent of its market.
Cosmetics that blatantly do not deliver the "age protection" they claim to...
Actually, they claim to reduce the "appearence" of aging, so they technically can deliver what they promis e- a little chemical that tightens the skin slightly to reduce the wrinkled look and they've done what they say.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
Hiring Han and Habib to go clicky-clicky is "advanced"?
O-kaaaay!
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Don't you mean FOURTHY THOUSAND? Honestly, the grammEr and spellung here just isn't up to Nigerian education ministry standards.
Vino, gyno, and techno -Bruce Sterling
I would really hate to see how the people that are hired to click links tell their dates what their profession is.
Jane: So what do you do for a living?
Billy. Uhh. I click links...
Jane: That's... uhh.. interesting. My last boyfriend went into space.
Billy: Well, I bet I make more money than him...
Jane: Hmm.
Heh.
"Instant gratification takes too long." - Carrie Fisher
that was supposed to be funny.
You have failed to consistently address my central thesis... You are not born with 'life knowledge' or 'knowledge of the domain of your problems'. This knowledge comes to you from an external source. If even any percentage of your external source is from advertising, then your point that "that advertising really does not generate any sales" is false.
It has become clear that your opinion is not based off of reason, or understanding of my argument, but more from a lack of world experience and an overestimation of your own independence:
when I want to boil some rice,
What rice did you buy? why? Did you get the cheapest.. if so, was it because it suited your needs (price) better than more expensive, enriched rice (nutrition). Where did you go to buy this rice? How did you know they sold rice there? Why did you choose that place over another?
I put it in a pot
What pot did you choose? Was it non-stick or not? Where do you go to buy a pot?
Somebody can come up with a better stove, that would use electricity more efficiently. [...] It is simply not worth it.
Spoken like someone who has truly never paid their own electric bill. Anyone else would say that if they saw an oven advertised that used less electricity, they would investigate it. They would then do a mental cost/benefit check and see if it is worth it to them.
And if I do come across one in a store (which is really the only form of advertising that the world needs), I will not buy it.
Nice logic... how do you know where the stores are? Are they allowed to put signs outside? Is that advertising? (yes). If your answer is "you just know" then how do you know where stores in out-of-the-way locations are? In your utopia, only stores such as Walmart would exist as local and startup stores would not be able to afford the price of visible retail locations... and would not be able to attract customers. Sounds good?
product sufficient to suit your needs, not just a "better product"
A better product is one that better at suiting your needs. Your needs are never 'sufficiently' suited.. as they are always things to be improved. In your case, it could be price. Are you seriously saying that you would spend $100 on a bottle of detergent because it is 'sufficient to suit your needs?'. If you saw an ad entitled 'Just like your bottle of detergent, but $1 cheaper... you wouldn't buy it because you learned about it in an 'evil ad'?
it makes no sense for me to spend more money on a better detergent just to keep them black.
False logic alert If you buy 2 bottles of detergent, you use each one half as much. Therefore you spend the same amount on detergent, but have more of your needs (cleaning your clothes and keeping them new looking) met. This is of course, presuming that both bottles cost the same, but that was not part of your augment. It is also not central to my point whether something is 'worth it' because that is an individual assessment based on an individuals cost/benefit analysis.
Can you see why I don't want to see any stupid clothes ads?
Cry me a river. If ads really irked you... you wouldn't watch them. Seriously, that is the net benefit of ads... they are voluntary and reduce the cost of associated goods (You don't pay for network television or radio). If you really dislike ads, don't watch... personally, I only listen to NPR and I don't own a TV (no, seriously).
That's why you should wash your car with rain water. Or, heck, just let the rain wash it
Your obviously from an area of nicer climes than me. Where they don't put salt on the roads that will rust your car if you don't wash it off. You can wax it to add a nice little layer of protection against this.
So, I hope I have shown sufficiently the holes in your argument, and how it isn't based off logic, but merely whining. I would like to hear your re
Drop dead easy.
All tobacco advertising 'out there' before 'this landmark 1964 U.S. Government report' was released.
The tobacco industry suppressed the truth and made billions.
Tobacco consumption == drug addiction, disease, and death.
Product differentiation is driven by superlatives--adjectives and adverbs. Strip out the adjectives and adverbs and all advertisements for the same kind of item from different manufactureres are essentially identical. For example, a Chevette will get you from point A to point B as will the high end 'Vette, the Corvette. They both have four wheels, an engine, and a body. The only difference between the two is the sticker price and the performance of the vehicles.