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Google Battles Fraudulent Clicks
hthb writes "Google admits on CNN Money that fraudulent clicks are becoming a very large problem for them. 'A top Google official said that growing abuse of the company's lucrative sponsored ad-search model jeopardizes the popular Internet search engine's business. "I think something has to be done about this really, really quickly, because I think, potentially, it threatens our business model," Google Chief Financial Officer George Reyes said Wednesday.'" We had an earlier story about attempted extortion.
As much as I like Google, I have a hard time feeling sorry for them on this one. What did they expect?
The guitars sound good, now give me about 10db more on the cow bell.
Google decides they'll pay people based on clicks, and people realize that all they've got to do is click the link to get paid.
This was OBVIOUSLY going to happen. Anyone remember AllAdvantage? If you pay someone to do a job that's so easily automated, you can BET someone's going to automate it and ask for all your money.
The solution is simple. STOP PAYING for clicked links! If your business model sucks and is inherently flawed, CHANGE IT. Don't bitch that you're getting taken advantage of.
"Doctor, it hurts when I do this..."
"THEN DON'T DO THAT!"
Seriously. I have been a google fan for a long time, like most slashdotters, but this press release just makes me sad. This may officially be the first Truly Stupid statement I've heard from the people of Google.
I'm choosing to see this as a sign that the end times are near. There are still plenty of smart people at google, but someone started letting idiots in, too.
But then who will pay for Google then? Somebody has to keep the power on at those server farms.
Um, how would we enjoy google then? I see the ads as pretty unobtriusive and have actively purchased items from them when I am looking for a product. For all that google gives us (thanks Gmail!) and their need to have a successful business for their shareholders and prospects for the future, they gotta get the renevue from somewhere. If it be ads that are a heck of a lot less obnoxious han most other ones (including ones see on /.) that keep google going, then I'm fine with it.
"As the intrepid kobold companion continues his journey, he begins to wonder... if priests raises dead, why anybody die?
On the one hand, the companies are paying for "clicks". Unless the contract is explicit about what constitutes a "click", it sounds like they're paying for clicks. And what the heck is a "fraudulent click"? I mean, how do you fake a click?
Draw your own conclusions, but I think even if Google eradicated fraudulent clicks, their ad program would still be a huge scam.
I wouldn't draw any conclusions from a single anecdote. The conclusions that I would draw is that their program is massively successful due to the number of web sites I see using Google advertising (either buying or selling)
I don't respond to AC's.
He complained and Google gave him this totally bogus, highly-technical explanation about referrer logs and that he may not be able to accurately track how many visitors were coming from them. Since he's a busy lawyer and the time it would take to fight Google for maybe $60-100 would take way more time than it was worth, he just quit using Google.
With him being a lawyer, I have a hard time working up any sympathy for him being confused by a highly technical explanation.
Reyes, speaking at an investor conference sponsored by Credit Suisse First Boston, was referring to an illegal practice known as "click fraud" that occurs when individuals click on ad links that appear next to search results in order to force advertisers to pay for the clicks.
I have trouble understanding how this is "illegal". Certainly unethical, but that's not the same thing.
I mean, as an advertiser, you enter into an agreement that you will use this "pay-per-click" model to promote your product. Obviously, this can be tampered with by having someone click your link non-stop. But what constitutes "too many" clicks? If I'm a small business, I can be hurt by even a fraction of clicks that some of the larger corporations can get.
I can see how Google has to take some steps to prevent people from doing this. I can also see how advertisers have to be more aware of this problem. But how exactly is it "illegal" for me to, say, repeatedly click on a link? The people who sponsored that link -- who agreed that they would sell their product via "pay per click" -- knew this and went ahead with it anyway. Can I be indicted for fraud charges for clicking 1,000,000 times? How about 100,000? How about 1,000? Or 100?
Unethical, but why illegal?
That's a good one, then we can all start paying per search on Google...
No really, I rather have the (somewhat) related advertising near my results... the way Google handles its advertising (in a non-blinking, agressive way) should be an example for other businesses, rather than saying they should get rid of it. It would make the web a lot better :)
- Leon Mergen
http://www.solatis.com
Yeah, that would hurt their business model more. So... no.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
This lamenting about their ineffective and easily-exploited business model sounds very similar to the whining we all love to hate by certain media industry groups, doesn't it?
There's a Mercedes gap too. I want one and can't afford one, but it's not government's job to do anything about it.
"Google gave him this totally bogus, highly-technical explanation "
IOW, you dad got a taste of what he does to other each and every day he works.
Forgive me if I find this midly funny.
How about ending the advertising? I wouldn't miss it.
So you're happy to enter your credit card number on Google and any sites that use AdSense adverts to fund themselves?
I for one welcome Google's approach to adverts - it's a hell of a lot better than the completely untargetted, very annoying Flash, animated GIFs and popups that other advertisers use. Whats more, Google's targetted text ads are sometimes actually useful.
Everyone complains about adverts but obviously don't think about the economics - web sites have to fund themselves somehow, so either you're going to have to pay directly or put up with the ads. IMHO ads designed to be annoying and untargetted can be blocked without any problem but Google style ads are reasonably non-intrusive and targetted so you should allow them - you want to push the advertisers in the direction of sensible unobtrusive ads rather than forcing the sites to close down.
http://blog.nexusuk.org
Prove it. Sorry but you're just some random Joe on the Intarnet making wild claims.
Maybe there actually was a technical reason. I can't see how Google can tell if the user actually gets to the remote site. I could click the click (registering a Google hit) and then cancel the page load for whatever reason. Maybe your dad's website is ass slow for 25% of people. You have no way to know.
The ratio of people to cake is too big
It's an easy fix... pay per unique visit, per time period that you care to filter by.
Right. And how do you propose to track unique visits. By IP address? Then what about the AOL proxy caches? Also, a large percentage of these are probably robots. They can play all sort of tricks with cookies.
This is a difficult problem.
The only time this hurts google is through their adsd on other websites. Say a scammer puts google ads on his website, then automates clicking on those ads, google then has to pay him for a portion of each click. This hurts google obviously.
Ads on google.com only hurt the advertiser, and as someone mentioned, they knew the deal when they signed up. Each click, fraudulent or not, is unlikely to become a sale.
I suspect that the proportion of fraudulent clicks used to hurt antoher company (by raising their advertising costs) is small compared to the number of scammers trying to make money by hosting google ads. I don't know the proportion of revenue google makes onsite vs. ads hosted on other site, but it would seem off-site ads may have to be stopped until a better business model can be figured out.
Spencer Ogden
Sure, and if he was Black, you'd call him a welfare cheat and talk about his love of fried chicken?
You don't know what kind of law he practices, who his clients are, and whether he helps the big guys crush little guys or helps little guys stand up to big guys.
A hammer can be used to build a house or bash in someone's skull. A law degree has good and bad uses as well.
There are a couple of words for the attitude in your comment... prejudice and bigotry.
And don't give me any mumbo jumbo about it being okay because there are so many bad lawyers. Under that logic, you can start justifying some really dangerous attitudes toward ethnic minorities so long as they meet some minimum arbitrary criteria you've set.
Hate is hate, no matter how you try to justify it.
Start a happiness pandemic
Because YOU CONTRACTUALLY AGREED NOT TO. If you don't like it, you should switch to another ad broker.
Your dad got a highly technical explanation that he obviously didn't understand, so that makes it automatically bogus?
It's possible that there was a totally non-bogus technical reason. For instance, if a lot of people were visiting the site from the same few ISP's, only the first ones would be counted in your dad's server logs because the rest would be loading the site from the ISP's cache.
Thinkin' Lincoln - a web comic of presidential proportions
No kidding. Just as other advertisers were moving to large and intrusive Flash advertising (often with audio, meaning you'd visit a page only to forget you had your speakers turned up from listening to music and get blasted out of your chair), Google went the exact opposite direction with relevant search-based advertising (AdSense). Instead of seeing an ad for the latest feminine hygiene products while viewing technology articles you actually got advertising for technology, and often times for the very technology you were reading about.
I imagine the fight against fraudulent clicks will be a downhill battle, but hopefully they find a way. The alternative to Google AdSense is much much worse.
All I know about Bush is I had a good job when Clinton was president.
What about a thousand people clicking from behind the same NAT device ? What about those clicking from dhcp'ed addresses ?
Dude you are hillarious in your superiority complex. Do you really think that bunch of nerds that Google is hasn't already considered all possible pay-per-click models including yours ?
PS. Cookies I hear you say ? Yeah, well, if I am to scam Google I'd be refusing them.
I don't have to know what type of law he practices (besides it it was a 'simple' form of law you would have said so). Laws are written for lawyers by lawyers. You can not look at the laws currently on the books and tell me they are simple.
And, son, don't confuse the facts with prejudice and bigotry. When you have to fall back on those words it just shows that you have nothing left to debate on and wish to use emotion to win your case instead of logic and the facts.
Google needs to not just police fraudulent clicks, but their own counting system. My dad tried their system to promote a fledgling e-commerce site for his wife's business. In two weeks, they reported about 400 clicks. Thing is, his web host reported only about 300 hits on his home page.
There's a decent chance that Google was right and your Dad was wrong. A click-through link sends the browser first to Google (where the hit is counted), and then refers the browser to your Dad's URL.
What can happen is that your Dad's web page is cached somewhere--on the user's computer, a cache provided by the ISP, etc. Google's links defeat caches by including unique strings, precisely to ensure that every click is counted. Your Dad's URLs, on the other hand, look the same every time. As a result, the user's click is logged by Google, but then the page is loaded from a cached copy, without ever touching your Dad's server.
This scenario is extremely common, because users tend to visit sites more than once. If someone didn't bookmark your Dad's page, he probably used a Google search to find it again.
--Len.
Disclaimer: I have no interest, financial or otherwise, in any company that earns revenue from click-through ads.
The problem is that the people committing the "fraud" are also extremely sophisticated, since, as I said, billions of dollars are on the line. Check out this article, for example, which explains one form of fraud:
You can't catch a highly distributed, highly random army of low-wage people in India and China without generally filtering out clicks from those places. But then what about ads that are highly popular in those areas (say, for the India Times?)? They get a free ride.
Bottom line is, when you involve billions of dollars in an industry that's as open to gaming as this one, you're going to get people who go to extreme lengths to defraud your system. They'll write adware that randomly distributes clicks around the globe that is indistinguishable from real traffic. They'll hire armies of underpaid workers around the globe to do it manually.
Do me a favor and go to Overture.com and click on "advertiser center" toward the top of the page. Now click on the "View bids tool" in the middle-right. Search for the bids on "mesothelioma" and enter the CAPTCHA.
Look at the top bid. $160. That's not a mistake. That's highly targeted advertising. If somebody is searching for "mesothelioma," chances are much higher than normal (say, in an impression-based model) that they or somebody they know could use a lawyer to deal with this disease (which is the cancer caused by asbestos inhalation). And if somebody CLICKS on the ad? That's worth $160 to somebody.
This is an extreme example, but the point is still a good one: impression-based advertising has its place for branders and whatnot, but performance-based advertising makes much more sense as a business model for many advertisers. Why would you want to spend money on impressions that have less to do with your target sector when you can spend them on people who care about your product, and have expressed this in an action?
So do you really think that a 2 billion dollar market (which has been projected to grow to 4 billion in the next few years) is just a "fad"? If anything, it's only a step in the direction of paying for conversions (actual purchases resulting from a click) where every move we make, from impression, to click, to conversion, is monitored and optimized for.
Actually the analogy is perfect. It doesn't matter to his argument whether the status is chosen, only that you are succumbing to common conception of how a certain status ("black", "lawyer") defines a person in ethical and moral terms.
Basically, you're arguing that an assigned label allows you to be justified in making certain ethical and moral judgements about a person. I simply disagree. You can no more make an ethical judgement about a person based on their profession than you can based on skin color or religion. There may be trends, but that simply doesn't justify applying it on a case-to-case basis without further information.
In the end, lawyers, blacks, christians, jews, muslims, plumbers, asians, and software engineers are just people, and you cannot really judge them any better after assigning them a label than you can beforehand. This applies less strictly in some situations than others ("murderer", "thief"), but even then, the individual case matters: do you know anyone who has never stolen anything? People change, and circumstances matter. Judge them after you know what they've done, not before. For all you know, the guy is a lawyer working for the EFF to preserve fair use rights with movies and music.
Look this really isn't such a big deal. The worst case scenario is that google cannot charge per click but has to use some other metric to determine fees, either flat, per "presentation" or some other related metric.
Why is pay per click good? Well there can be only two reasons;
(1) It lowers the legitimate threshold of entry to make affordable something that would otherwise be unaffordable. In other words by using pay per click they can offer a service to someone who would otherwise be unable to afford it
(2) It enables Google to generate extraordinary profits (ie overcharge).
If someone is happy to pay per click because there is some "perception" that a click is something inherently valuable then the fact that these clicks are becoming (or have become) less valuable is merely a correction that returns adWords to the standard advertising channels where "viewers" are the only statistical measure available. However, if the real reason that Google cares is (2) then they deserve nothing.
In fact even if clicks become valueless, there are many other metrics that Google can use that will mean they can be even more precise with their pricing model than the broadcast advertisers. Things like page views per geographical region or service provider etc etc etc.
"The first thing to do when you find yourself in a hole is stop digging."
Why would I have said what form of law he practices? My post was about Google's clicks, not about my dad, nor about law. He was just an actor in the story. This isn't a prospectus where I'd need to give two page bios on the principals. And what kind of law he practices is immaterial. Making a judgement about his character or the kind of treatment he deserves from others, merely because he practices law, *is* prejudiced.
And what does the complexity or simplicity of the law have to do with anything? The bible is hard to read, full of contradictions, and we leave it up to priests and theologians to interpret it. And at times, the bible has *been the law*. Yet I do not judge all men of God who choose Christ based on the misdeeds that are rife in the history of Church-sponsored oppression and abuse.
My wife and I are an interfaith couple (and I'm the non-Christian), but the minister who presided over our wedding is one of the most wonderful people I've met. OTOH, that Brother Jed character who used to come to my college campus and damn everyone was a total pr*ck. But I don't judge Christian men of God based on either. I judge them based on what they, as individuals, do.
And, son, don't confuse the facts with prejudice and bigotry. When you have to fall back on those words it just shows that you have nothing left to debate on and wish to use emotion to win your case instead of logic and the facts.
No, calling someone Hitler to evoke an emotional response is a fallback. Identifying something as prejudice when it is prejudice is just shedding light on it.
If you think any Muslim you meet is a potential terrorist until he proves he isn't, you're prejudiced. If you think any lawyer you meet is a sleazebag until he proves he isn't, you're similarly prejudiced. If you disparage an individual based on your biases about a group, that's bigotry.
It's that simple. And if you choose to remain prejudiced, it's *your* life that will be poorer for it.
- Greg
Start a happiness pandemic
I have a right to know who is advertising on my blog. I was black and had a website that talked about being black, I would be very upset if the KKK advertised on my website. I know that is an extreme example. I also am interested in who is advertising on my site. I have a reasonable excuse for clicking my own links.
"brxref
The click monitoring is used to provide proof that the advertisement is paying off. In other industries, this proof is not necessary. For example, its not possible to determine whether people are buying your product because of your television ad, your radio ad, your newspaper ad, or because they happened by it at the store.
So why should the rules be different for internet ads? The theoretical possibility of doing click-monitoring is alluring, but apparently it is not a practical possibility. So just let it go, and sell internet ads just like you sell any other kind of ads.
If laws were watertight and free of ambiguity, we wouldn't need Judges. The function of a Judge is to interpret the law and its applicability to a given set of circumstances surrounding the accused. That's why laws have a section on the intent of the law... to give Judges a guideline to decide when an act that might violate the letter of the law should be excused because it clearly does not violate its intent.
The classic example of this is a grade-school policy: "under no circumstance may a child be allowed in the hall without a pass; those caught without a pass will be suspended." Now, a kid is about to throw up and runs out to the restroom. On his way back, he's stopped without a pass. If the rule is interpreted by letter alone, the kid should be suspended -- but most reasonable people would see that the intent of the rule was not violated, and that the kid's actions were reasonable and appropriate under the circumstances.
Law is tricky. If we take law too literally, we must make a lot of laws, which only results in a lot of loopholes. If, on the other hand, we make the law too ambiguous, we give far too much power to the Judges who interpret it.
So, while colloquial English would probably be bad, you've created a false dichotomy in assuming that legalese and colloquial English are the only options. What about simply using formal written English? Most people would find that easier to understand, and meanings in formal written English don't change very rapidly.
We may not imagine how our lives could be more frustrating and complex—but Congress can. – Cullen Hightower