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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.""
Imagine a worm that infects machines that, instead of being an open email spam relay, surfs ad-heavy sites and simulates webclicks.
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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.
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).
Ever hear of LWP?
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.
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.
(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...
Google's got it right. Small. Innocuous. Relevant to what you're looking for.
Yup. Like most of the geeks here, I mostly use browsers that can do things like block images from sites, so as to cut down on the more obnoxious ads. But I've also bought a fair number of things online over the years. And when I'm looking to buy something, I tend to first ask google about it. Both the matches and the accompanying ads are useful in that case.
Dunno how well it works with the general population, but google's approach is fairly good for people who are trying to find something and just get annoyed by irrelevant ads.
We oughta let them know that we appreciate their subtler approach to the whole topic.
In a few cases, commercial sites have asked me how I found them, and I've enjoyed telling them that I used google. That oughta give some of their marketing people a bit of a pause, since they probably "know" that google's approach isn't very successful at selling.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
The fact is, more often than not, ads servers are slow. Web pages design being sometimes such that the rest of the page won't load before the ad has, you end up waiting for no reason before you can read the information you came for. This is my first reason for blocking ads. That and the wasted bandwidth (not really significant anymore with fast Internet accesses, granted), Flash ads complaining about missing plugins (really gets on my nerves), or bringing the CPU down on its knees for no apparent reason.
To me, the future of advertisement is in user-requested ads. Yes, the kind of thing Google does. Interested in something? Search for information and commercials at the same time. And I really mean: decent, informative ads, matching your request, aware of your geographical location, and so on. That's the kind of ad I'd click since it would be likely to interest me (as opposed to 99.99% of the ads seen of web sites these days).
Face it, with the advent of Firefox and other (existing or yet to come) advanced browsers, built-in ad-blocking will be on everyone's desktop within a year. Providing it can be set up with little effort (and it really could, if a common base is set up) by about anyone, advertisers will have to switch to decent, non-intrusive ways to touch visitors.
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.
I have two little children and when smut tv ads come on, the channel is changed.
I have three little ones myself and my advice to you is not to watch those kinds of channels when the children are up. I've never seen an ad for smut or porn on any of the channels the kids regularly watch (CBC, Teletoon, CTV, Discovery, TLC, etc.) -- After 10 or 11pm perhaps on the networks, sure, but they're in bed before then.
That seems very shortsighted - what's wrong with well targetted text-only banner ads like Google serves? They're not annoying and they pay for the websites you're visiting (do you want to enter your credit card number on *every* site you visit?
The problem ads are the completely untargetted popups, stupid annoying animated gifs, flash, and increasingly DHTML floating objects (see the Dilbert site for details).
Rather than discouraging sites from using adverts at all (which will result in many useful sites shutting down), shouldn't we be enouraging them to use acceptable, and dare I say it - useful advertising? If for one find Google's *targetted* ads useful.
The same can be said of TV ads - if I see an ad that looks funny while watching TV I'll actually watch it, but if (like the vast majority) the ad is designed to be as annoying as possible, I'll just fastforward through it using my MythTV box. The advertisers need to be trained that spamming the consumers with annoying crap is unacceptable, but providing them with well targetted and not annoying ads is worthwhile.
http://blog.nexusuk.org
Because of thier desire for the IPO alot of financial info is now available.
Not exactly. Because Google has exceeded certain revenues and number of investors, they are required to file their financial information. Doing an IPO is merely a byproduct of the requirement to file. Since they're required to spill the beans, might as well raise some cash at the same time.
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
Well, I have anecdotal evidence. A company in Delhi (the capital of India) contacted my sister about a year ago and asked her to click on ads for them. The pay wasn't great (certainly nothing like a college graduate makes), but as much as many Indians make at a full-time job.
After my sister told me about this, I checked up on the company out of curiosity. Terrible website, you could tell at a glance that this was borderline illegal/unethical/sleazy just from their website. But I've found several people who work for similar companies. Often they're bored housewives who don't mind working a couple of hours per day to earn some spending money.
Pay per click doesn't work either, isn't that the point of this entire slashdot article?
Newspaper/TV/Radio/Magazines advertising works just fine.
Or perhaps the only advertising medium should be spam? If that didn't work, nobody would do it, right?
-- it must be true, it's on the internet.