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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.""
Ads are like taxes.. they support the things that people want to use but don't want to pay for.
-B
Imagine if a new "no change" bit was put on all tv sets so that when a commercial came on that you did not like, you were not able to change the channel? I have two little children and when smut tv ads come on, the channel is changed.
There are too many pr0n and gimmick ads on the net. I don't mind targeted ads, for example, tech ads on /. I don't mind, though I don't care for graphical and/or flash ads and usually block them. Another thing to keep in mind with text based ads are that they are very hard to block, especially if the server grabs the text ad and sends down the HTML, then you cannot block by server such as *servedby.*.
It is not the job of consumers to keep a business or business model afloat. It is the businesses job to make sure they are changing to meet demand. If most of the internet advertising companies stop with the spyware, popups, homepage jacking, etc and switched to plain text or simple HTML, there would be a lot less effort in blocking the ads and probably many more clicks on the ads.
If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land,
it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. -James Madison
and if the advertise doesn't sell anything?
if they want to generate traffic to a page where you can download a paper which might generate a sale, which takes place via phone and take weeks to complete?
if google switched over to CPA they'd lose a looooot of money
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.
Let me make a example; You own property, you rent it out to a company wanting to put up a billboard. With this, you make $X profit. The company considers the effects of the ad-campaign worth more than they pay you, so they also come out ahead.
However, the other property around your migth degrade in value as a result of the visually noisy advertising. Or the people passing trough every day migth consider the ads annoying and be willing to pay (in aggregate !) more to be free of the ads than your profit is.
Summa summarum, a net loss, but the loss is on other parts than you and the advertiser.
Other example, which more slashdotters will agree with;
You hire me to send 1 million emails with ads for your product. The sales generated give you $5000 in profit, and I do the mailing for $2000, having costs of my own of $500.
We both come out ahead, you by $3000 and I by $1500. $4500 in sum. Looks good, no ?
Until you consider the loss for the 1 million receivers. If the sum of annoyances at the ISP and end-user exceeds 0.45 *cent* pro message, then emailing the spam wasn't really profitable. It only looked that way to you because you get the profits, and someone else carries the cost.
If you think about it, this ain't rare in advertising, though rarely is it so blatant as with spam.
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.
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.
Exactly. I don't mind ads. What I mind (and tend to block) are ads that interfere with my ability to read the web site content that I want to read, or mess with my browser/computer working the way I want it to. This includes everything mentioned above (spyware, popups, flash, tracking cookies, etc.) as well as ad servers that can't keep up and stall things. I can't count the number of times I've been stuck waiting for some poor server at doubleclick to send something so that the page would finish rendering.