Newsweek On Click Fraud, Search Engine Response

prostoalex writes "Newsweek magazine says click fraud is the bane of the search advertising industry. Google and Yahoo! are apparently working on the standardized definition of a "good-faith" click in order to weed out the fraudulent ones. Meanwhile, merchants like Assaf Nehoray are taking their money elsewhere, getting abundant clicks, but no real revenue on Internet advertising campaigns. Newsweek also mentions Google suing a Texas company for placing the AdSense code and then clicking on it in order to run up the revenue. John Battelle says that his friends in the search industry tell him the click fraud is growing and that changes are not too far away."

Comments

You're about six months behind

[Anonymous Coward]

Google's Fraud Squad Battles Phantom Clicks

Puff

[FiReaNGeL]

Everyone is affected, big or small "publisher".

But I assure you that it hurts when your 100$ Adword budget goes in a puff of probably fraudulents clicks, with nothing you can do about it. The guys at SEO Chat forum are not very happy about this, I assure you.

It's discouraging me of running small-scale Adwords campaigns, honestly.

Re:Puff

[iconnor]

Is there any service that advertising can pool their useless clicks?

To an advertiser, a useless click is a click that hits the adwords landing page and little (or nothing else) and does not mean a sale. If these bogus clicks could then be processed at a 3rd party auditing house, then fraud could be detected and each member could then complain to google about bogus clicks.

I am sure someone must have thought of this already - I just can't find it listed on google :(

Re:Puff

[Eric Giguere]

But then who polices the advertisers? Is Google supposed to trust you to tell them when a visitor who reaches your landing page converts into a sale? What if you're not selling anything, at least not directly? I can see all kinds of problems at that end, too.

Really, you're paying Google for traffic. Qualified traffic, yes, but traffic just the same. How you convert that traffic into sales is not Google's worry.

Eric
Listen, people: JavaScript is not Java

Re:Puff

[Donny Smith]

>It's discouraging me of running small-scale Adwords campaigns, honestly.

Well, then don't run it!

That's what I'm gonna do. Kind of... Namely, you still CAN run your campaign, just don't use non-Google sites to show your ads. Show your ads only alongside Google search results.

In my campaign I get most clicks from Google domains anyway so turning off display on AdSense sites won't be a big deal. However, it may hurt Google a bit (if everyone gets a small proportion of clicks from AdSense sites and 30% of everyones stop showing ads on AdSense sites... tens of thousands of cancellations will cost Google a pretty penny!)

Re:Puff

[blowdart]

a useless click is a click that hits the adwords landing page and little (or nothing else) and does not mean a sale

You're assuming everyone who advertises wants to sell from that click through, that's not necessarily true. I've clicked through, thought interesting, bookmarked and revisited later when I've had more time. To your mind that's a useless click, even though it may well garner a sale later. I've also seen sites advertising that are doing it to build traffic and (presumably) increase their own advertising fees, so there's no selling involved to me, the person who clicked through.

Any system that relies on the honesty of strangers or business rivals is doomed to failure.

Re:Puff

[circusmaximus]

The only possible way to differentiate between the legitimate and fraudulent user sessions is to use a statistical scoring system. Check out Clicklab http://www.clicklab.com/. We are applying several dozen tests to each visitor session to detect fraudulent signatures, and calculate the Click Inflation Index as the ratio of the sessions deemed fraudulent to total number of sessions.

And from just last month

[Anonymous Coward]

Google Battles Fraudulent Clicks

Re:And from just last month

[drakethegreat]

Yep I was thinking this sounded very familar and I was right. Maybe if they keep complaining they should have an update? Its the same old news without something new happening.

Re:And from just last month

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe the editors are trying to say slashdot.org participates in their own fraudulent click scheme, and is defrauding their advertisers as well? Maybe the editors are white-hat, but can't say outright that slashdot.org is doing so without fear of losing their jobs, so they're giving subtle hints by duping article submissions.... Or maybe they're just duping article submissions to get the fraudulent clicks???

Re:And from just last month

[drakethegreat]

Thats the basis of a conspiracy theory. Somehow I don't believe any of what you said just because you have no reason to believe that.

3rd world countries

[mboverload]

In third world countries companies can literally have hundreds of people in a sweatshop clicking on ads. It's amazing.

Re:3rd world countries

[Anonymous Coward]

That's awsome, in a lot of ways. If people were able to put that kind of labor to good use. Where I work, we have all these cool fucking underground tunnels running everywhere. It's a university, so running utilities is a breeze. Well, back in the day, that's how things got done because labor was so cheap. Now, we just get a ditch witch and knife it into a little bitty trench.

It'd be nice to have labor like that to do cool things.

Re:3rd world countries

[workman161]

Is that how the industry has outsourced again?

Re:3rd world countries

[Anonymous Coward]

minion?

Re:3rd world countries

[enosys]

Why would anyone do such a thing? They could easily simulate it using software. That would be cheaper for many reasons. They don't have to hire all those people. They can do it all using one or a few computers instead of many. They need a lot less space and they have smaller energy bills.

Re:3rd world countries

[Anonymous Coward]

Recently, our company had to digitize thousands and thousands of pages of legacy docs so that they could be quickly searched for key phrases. It turned out to be cheaper to have foreigners in India re-type them in by hand than to have them scanned and OCR'd.

Re:3rd world countries

[shawb]

I'm not quite sure about the sweatshop type model, but I have read about a few places that have a lot of people just clicking on ads for a few hours a day. I guess it's similar to the "hit the monkey and win" type ad click racket, except people actually get paid a small amount for a lot more clicks.

Or it could even be something like free internet access if you just click on banners for X amount of time per day. I think the reason that they don't simulate it with software is that actual people clicking on the banners makes it a lot harder to track than some script.

This looks similar in some ways to pyramid scams. Someone loses out, except this time it might be the actual advertiser which _GETS_ the fraudulant clicks in the first place. I'm sure that the advertisers would eventually catch on and yank this out from under people's noses. Maybe even sue those who run the clickfraud for... well... fraud.

Re:3rd world countries

[drgonzo59]

That is the reason all those "get payed to click" schemes failed. I had written scripts to move and click my mouse mouse for a couple of those companies and was getting about $20 per month. The way I saw it I was just getting payed for the little script I wrote. The better and more intelligent the scipt was, the more I should be rewarded. I gave up when they started to pop up windows with specific instructions that had to be read and executed.

Re:3rd world countries

[britneys 9th husband]

I think you're on to something with the "hit the monkey" model. If you think about it, Google click fraud has a lot in common with crapflooding Slashdot. In both cases, you have a malicious user trying to do something (e.g. post a comment or click on an ad) far more times in a short period of time than any legitimate user ever would. It becomes a cat-and-mouse game. The difference is that with Google ads, the stakes are much higher, and the techniques used (both by the malicious users and the site trying to stop them) are more sophisticated.

An obvious thing to look for is lots of traffic coming from the same IP or subnet. That's why Slashdot has IP bans, makes you wait 2 minutes before posting another comment, etc. Google of course can look for similar patterns. Therefore malicious users need to make their traffic look like it's coming from all over the place instead of just one computer. The GNAA used to crapflood Slashdot by compiling lists of hundreds of open proxies and writing a script to have them post comments all at once (Slashdot no longer allows open proxies to post). We can assume Google filters out ad clicks from anonymous proxies. So now the malicious users need a way to recruit hundreds of computers, preferably from lots of different subnets, and without using open proxies. You can do this by paying people to click ads from their computers, and "hit the monkey" is probably the cheapest known way to do this. If you're making more money on clicks than what you're paying your army of clickers, you'll make a profit.

Now, I suppose you could also write an automated program to do the same thing, but that would be called a "virus" or a "worm," and these things tend to attract a lot of attention from various law enforcement agencies. Better to pay people a couple cents to hit the monkey than go to prison.

Re:3rd world countries

[Cracell]

you're joking right? if they want I'll write them a bot to do it for like 100bucks, but I didn't know they were going to "use it"

Never saw the real motive in this

[MrRTFM]

Sure, they can cost the competitors money, but doesn't that increase your own costs (competitors do it back to you).

All that ends up happening is that the advertisers get rich

Darn!

[Sebby]

I thought they were talking about Amazon's one-click!

thought this was dead

[SycoCowz]

Those pay-per-click things are still around? I thought they died long ago with AllAdvantage and its copycats.

Re:thought this was dead

[ScentCone]

Have you even used Google in the last two years? Notice the stuff on the right...

Re:thought this was dead

[khrtt]

Have you even used Google in the last two years? Notice the stuff on the right...

Actually, people who use Google don't notice the stuff on the right. Your mind just turns it off. You have to make a consious effort to actually look at the page instead of reading the results like usual to notice the stuff on the right.

Re:thought this was dead

[ScentCone]

Well, I use it all the time, and do notice well-worded and appropriate ads. I consult to retailers, so I'm probably unusual in giving a damn. I can tell you, though, that non-scamming people still do click on those ads. And they work. They may be getting polluted by abusers, but Google's light touch is just about right, I think. When you're using Google specifically to look for a product or service, those ads mean a lot more to you.

Re:thought this was dead

[wheany]

I actually bought something because of a Google ad. I was looking for info on Nintendo DS and the ad on the right said something to the effect of "Nintendo DS from Japan" in Finnish. That got my attention.

how to fix click fraud

[Prophetic_Truth]

just a guess, but maybe they could use the same techniques that identify DDoS attacks to also finger click fraud?

Cycle.

[Anonymous Coward]

Phantom clicks > No Sales > Advertisers Decrease > Price Per Click Drops > Phantom Clicks Stops...

Re:Cycle.

[Anonymous Coward]

Nope, the magic pixie dust of market forces can't save us this time.

What happens is that price per click drops, number of fradulent clicks increases to make up for it, repeat until such a high percentage of clicks are fradulent that no advertiser will use the service anymore.

In the long view the problem is self-correcting because the parasites will kill their host, but it is not a good solution.

Re:Cycle.

[Technician]

Phantom clicks > No Sales > Advertisers Decrease > Price Per Click Drops > Google goes bust > Phantom Clicks Stops...

Click fraud?

[mistersooreams]

What exactly is this click fraud thing? I can't really see how it can be exactly defined. Maybe the owners of the website occasionally want to click on their own adverts because (*shock*) the product is actually relevant to their site, and thus to them. In fact, relevance is supposed to be the whole idea of Google's TextAds, isn't it?

Obviously someone genuinely wanting to click their own ads ten thousand times is rather unlikely, but where do you draw the line? Is this written in a contract anywhere? What about getting other people to click the ads for you?

This seems to be a very fuzzy legal matter. I'm as pro-Google as the next Slashdotter but I can't see how they have a water-tight case here. That said, I'm not an expert, so perhaps someone can correct me.

Re:Click fraud?

[404notfound]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Click_fraud

Re:Click fraud?

[Chatmag]

I know that Google says if you want to check an advertiser out that is showing on your site, or are interested in what that advertiser offers, hover your mouse over the link, then type it into a location bar, don't click the link directly. One interesting side note. The link does not show in Firefox, just IE.

It's useful to weed out ads that are direct competitors, or ads you would deem inappropriate for your site. Google then has the provision to "lock out" those ads by going into your account and add those sites into your Url filter.

Re:Click fraud?

[FiReaNGeL]

Its against your "contract" with Google (that you accept when signing up with Adsense) to click on your ads. Even once. Even to "check" if its working. Thats were the line is.

"Begging" for clicks, directly or indirectly, is agaisnt the terms of agreement, too. "I have trouble paying my hosting bills, so I added ads to the left, please support us", that kind of thing.

Don't see the point? Ads can be very profitable. Some keywords go for $0.03, sure. Some go for $7.00, too.

1- Set up website targeting profitable keyword

2- Set up a ring of "friends" clicking on the ads time to time

3- Profit!

Re:Click fraud?

[Chatmag]

Google AdSense Policies

Re:Click fraud?

[tuxter]

maybe this would be a bit easier for everyone hey....
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Click_fraud
It's not that difficult to format a URL is it?

Re:Click fraud?

[Mistlefoot]

You are a webmaster and you want to see what the ads link to for relevance. Mouse over and check the status bar for the link and then simply type it into your browser window.

You've adhered to google's policies AND discovered what the result of that click is. If you are a webmaster and you CANNOT figure this out you deserve to lose any money Google TextAds would have earned you. The policy is simple. Click on the ad yourself and forfeit the right to your earnings.

Re:Click fraud?

[Anonymous Coward]

If you don't get the url in firefox you probably disallowed javascript to change the statusbar.

Re:Click fraud?

[kiddailey]

A good portion of the time, ads are delivered via an intermediary tracking system rather than linking to the merchant itself, so typing the url manually wouldn't make any difference. In the case of google though, the URL is listed -- but you still have to unescape it :)

Re:Click fraud?

[404notfound]

It's not that difficult to copy and paste a URL into your address bar, is it?

Re:Click fraud?

[jp10558]

It wouldn't be if slashdot didn't put all those random spaces in most URLs posted here.

Oh really?

[Anonymous Coward]

FTA:
Advertisers once bid pennies to place their links prominently alongside searches for words like "refinance." With traffic to the search sites skyrocketing, last week's bid for that word was $12 a click.

Oh really? I just did a Google search for "refinance", and clicked on each of the links. Didn't look like $12 to me! Anyone else care to check?

Re:Oh really?

[Anonymous Coward]

I bilieve they meant $12 billed to the business buying the ad space on google per click. Not you.
I want to run that advertisng model.
"Click HERE and pay!!!"

Uh duh...

[jmcmunn]

Who ever thought Google AdWords were any more effective than a pop up ad? The reason so many porn sites use pop ups is that often times they get paid on a "per view" or "per click" basis. Hmmm...if every user has to click the fake 'X' in the top corner, thus sending them to the advertiser, then the referring porn site makes money on a click through.

Same idea with AdWords. Why would anyone think click through ads are any better? Everyone remember the days when they had the little clients that would monitor when you were online and give you money for every hour you surfed? Ha, how long did it take you to set up a macro to run the mouse while you slept? :-)

The only advertising that makes you money, is advertising that sells your product. Tricking people into following a link or viewing a page they didn't want to doesn't do anyone any good in the long run. Pay per click can only last so long.

Re:Uh duh...

[RobertTaylor]

HA!

"The only advertising that makes you money, is advertising that sells your product. Tricking people into following a link or viewing a page they didn't want to doesn't do anyone any good in the long run."

And in this posters sig:

"Get a FREE MiniMac Here! [freeminimacs.com] "

Scams obviously work as good tricks :)

Re:Uh duh...

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

This is hilarious, coming from a guy whose sig is a ponzi scheme link. Asshat.

Re:Uh duh...

[fyngyrz]

Disagree. Pay per click isn't the problem. Bad (misleading) ads are the problem; there's no reason to presume that pay per click will die because of these. The advertisers will die, instead. And where's the downside of that?

There are perfectly reasonable ways to use Google ads, for instance. Describe your product honestly, market your product honestly on the target page the ad leads to, and provide a good and well supported product.

If you can't be bothered to do that, then you deserve to have your ad budget eat you for dinner, IMHO.

If you do follow those basic guidelines, then the ads will bring potential customers by your pages, and some percentage of them will actually purchase your product(s) and/or service(s).

There's no magic to this -- unless you're a fraud right out of the gate anyway.

That's not to say that you can't work the system in such a way as to make it legitimately benefit you. For instance:

Some of my competitors do such a poor job, I decided to put Google ads right on our sales pages so our customers could easily find our competitors. The results they get are so yucky that I consider them to be marketing for us, in a reverse sort of way. There's nothing on our pages that say "go look at how crappy our competitors are, click the ads and then come back" or anything like that... the ads just sit there, advertising software similar to ours... and our sales picked up about 20% over four weeks once we put the ads on. Apparently, our customers are savvy enough to know where they've been -- and how to come back -- when they wander off to look at these other folks. And the funny thing is that we get paid for all this. Now, if our competitors are silly enough to keep advertising a shoddy product, why, I'm simply delighed to host their ads. :)

Re:Uh duh...

[Anonymous Coward]

You are clueless. If you had any experience with Adsense/Adwords, you would know that many publishers and advertisers have had great success with the programs. Comparing Google's program to popup ads is insane. As a Firefox user, I block popups and other ads (using a combination of default features and Adblock), but I leave the Adsense ads. They are usually very relevant to whatever site I'm viewing and aren't annoying like popups or flashing banner ads. I know many people who feel the same way.

Re:Uh duh...

[jmcmunn]

I am in no way hiding where this link leads...no tinyurl crap. Stright up, if you want to click it, then click it. If not, then don't it's as simple as that.

Re:Uh duh...

[DevolvingSpud]

> There are perfectly reasonable ways to use Google ads, for instance. Describe your product honestly, market your product honestly on the target page the ad leads to, and provide a good and well supported product.
> If you can't be bothered to do that, then you deserve to have your ad budget eat you for dinner, IMHO.

The problem isn't misleading ads - it's the fact that your competitors could burn up your ad budget very quickly by simply writing a script that "clicks" your ad link over and over again. If you set your ad budget low, your ad falls off and then theirs gets seen. If you set your budget high, then they just end up costing you money.

Re:Uh duh...

[Anonymous Coward]

Straight up now tell me
Do you really want to love me forever?
oh oh oh
Or am I caught in a hit and run?
Straight up now tell me
Is it gonna be you and me together?
oh oh oh
Are you just having fun?

Re:Uh duh...

[eclectro]

Atari?? Is that you??

You're the only one who breaks into song around here. At least own up to it.

Re:Uh duh...

[ssundberg]

Who ever thought Google AdWords were any more effective than a pop up ad?

Actually, it is more effective. At a site where I run both banner ads and Google AdSense, the click-thru ratio for Google most days is around 2%; the average click-thru ratio for the banner ads is around 0.2%. The income I make from running AdSense is equal to the income I receive from running both leaderboard, 300x250 box, AND skyscrapers banners on the web site.

Re:Uh duh...

[Refrozen]

Yep. And when you read the article, you will understand this is about click fraud, and not crappy ads.

Re:Uh duh...

[Anonymous Coward]

The players:

• google, runs an ad network
• DVDseller.com, has a product
• sometvfansite.com, has content and visitors

DVDseller.com subscribes to google adsense and has a list of keywords that describe their product.

somtvfansite.com has bandwidth bills and decides to pay them by becoming an adsense click provider - so their site registers with google as being of interest to fans of 'some tv show' and therefore likely to buy DVDs of the series.

An ad to DVDseller.com/store/sometvshow.html (through several sets of redirects) appears at sometvfansite.com, every visitor to sometvfansite that clicks on that link results in $5 being paid by DVDseller.com to google, google then splits the money with sometvfansite.com.

The problem is that some sites set up bogus content to get adsense links, then generate clicks on those links. The ad network and seller are not to blame.

Re:Uh duh...

[dave1g]

I soooo had the mouse moving program, alladvantage gave me a few good checks. got paid to search a few times also. A couple other companies to but most have gone bankrupt now.

Re:Uh duh...

[kiddailey]

The advertisers will die, instead. And where's the downside of that?

The downside is that sites that use advertising in a (sometimes last-ditch) attempt to recoup hosting/bandwidth costs will no longer be free.

Re:Uh duh...

[Anonymous Coward]

The point is you posted the link in the first place which makes you an ASSHAT of the biggest variety. ASSHAT.

ITS A SCAM!!! Straight up, admit it!

Re:Uh duh...

[ajs318]

No, the problem is that DVDseller.com think that by splattering adverts all over other people's screens willy-nilly, they will earn more than enough money in increased sales to pay for the adverts. But visitors to sometvfansite.com really don't want to be splattered with adverts, even for DVDs of sometvshow. Some of them click on the advert anyway, even though they have no intention of buying. Only a grade-one idiot would pay for a click that didn't result in a sale. DVDseller.com just got greedy and lost out, is all. And Google and sometvfansite.com get to split the proceeds of DVDseller.com's greed.

Re:Uh duh...

[fyngyrz]

Yes, providing free stuff in a non free world is a very tough thing to do. Bandwidth costs money. Infrastructure costs money. Maintainance costs money. Administration costs money.

I understand that you want "free" anyway, but I don't have much sympathy for it.

If you really want free stuff, you have to arrange for the infrastructure that carries the free stuff to be free, or as nearly so as possible. Are you doing that?

I host several free sites. Two of them carry a whole bunch of traffic (specifics if you're curious, otherwise, not particularly relevant); others, not so much. Getting the site to pay for itself is not easy, in fact I'd say it is an art. There will be lots of failures. Others will arise, though.

Now, if Google is having severe problems with one kind of fraud or another, the thing I keep in mind is that it's not just the advertiser's revenue stream that is at risk here, it is Google's as well. I expect they'll solve the problem -- they have the best of motivations to do so.

Re:Uh duh...

[jmcmunn]

No it isn't a scam. And I really don't care how many anonymous fools call me an asshat. I'll be listening to my free ipod, watching my free tv while I get my last few referrals for my free minimac.

later, asshat.

Zombies being used as proxies?

[PornMaster]

I wonder how much of getting away with this is done by using open proxies laid down on zombies by $WORM_OF_THE_MONTH.

Obviously the SEs know to watch for 100+ adwords clicks in 15 minutes from the same IP (though maybe this is harder due to decentralization of the data centers and another reason for them to get a dark fiber network - see the article from earlier today) but if the clicks appear to be coming from broadband users across the US, I could see worms playing a big part in this, relatively undetectably.

Re:Zombies being used as proxies?

[Anonymous Luddite]

>> I wonder how much of getting away with this is done by using open proxies laid down on zombies by $WORM_OF_THE_MONTH.

I was just reading a link on webmasters world about this kind of fraud. The best guesses there seemed to agree the fraudulent click campaigns were launched through bot-nets.

Re:Zombies being used as proxies?

[JimmytheGeek]

I had a machine on my net that was using a list of roughly 1000 proxies to load a web bug. I figured it was a pay for click scam.

Re:Zombies being used as proxies?

[kawika]

Take a look at FindSpot for another example of click fraud. This site is taking AdWords copy and making it look like search engine output. When someone clicks on it, FindSpots launders the click through a redirect and the advertiser pays. At least that is what happened with our AdWords ad.

This is old hat in the adult industry:

[dpplgngr]

For any affiliate program, as that community operates like the mos eisley cantina. In fact, it's expected, and has been dealt with over and over. Google should talk to the old guard on this one.

I'm sorry to admit that gfy is the authoritative source on this problem; no joke!

Re:This is old hat in the adult industry:

[Anonymous Coward]

The adult industry never really dealt with the problem, they just moved away from ppc to percentage based and flat commission per signup affiliate programs.

Re:This is old hat in the adult industry:

[Anonymous Coward]

"If it's possible to cheat then some people will, and ruin it for everyone else."

This seems to be the general deal on the internet, whether it's games, PPC, toplists, search engine ranking etc

PPC in the adult industry is almost non-existant nowdays. A sign of things to come for Google?

Re:This is old hat in the adult industry:

[Anonymous Coward]

The adult industry never really dealt with the problem, .. []

Some of them tried to deal with it, but the smart "hitbotters" can spoof every aspect of a real surfer, from a unique IP (proxy or botnet) to the user-agent. There is no way to deal with this problem.

Re:This is old hat in the adult industry:

[Anonymous Coward]

You idiot, why the fuck did you include a link to GFY?

We already have too many surfers and wannabe adult webmaster kiddiots who think they can become rich overnight with little work only to realize a week later that they don't have the proper marketing skills and choose to install adware/spyware on surfers machines, scam people and do click fraud to earn a buck or two.

GFY and other business forums for adult webmasters are not the "authoritative source on this problem", it's mother fuckers like you.

Re:This is old hat in the adult industry:

[Anonymous Coward]

PPC in the adult industry is almost non-existant nowdays.

It still exists but the rules have been changed by the sponsors and you must make a sale for every 50-100clicks or whatever.

And since we have terabytes of the copyright material being spread on P2P networks, the ratios for signups have gotten worse and worse.

The online adult industry is already moving towards DRM to protect their content.

Overture "click protection"

[Camel Pilot]

A while back I had a frustrating exchange with Overture (aka Yahoo) on "Click Protection" on their PPC service. In the meantime I have back engineered their highly touted filter and it is a joke. I could write click bot with a few lines of Perl and a list of proxy servers. My experience has been that they will not pay attention to you until you have goon thru the trouble of documenting the event. Here is a summary of my experience.

Overture claims to provide "Click Protection" for their pay-per-click advertising service. In reality they fail to prevent the most basic and easiest to detect non-authentic clicks - that is competitors clicking on competitors. They do not even filter out a customer clicking on their own links from within the Overture manager. Nor do they provide a method for an advertiser to test their own ad rendered URL's - a necessary function as a means to test the validity of an entered URL.

Since filtering out such clicks would be simple and straight forward using established cookies or session id's - I can only speculate the reasons for not patching this obvious flaw and question the "sophistication of Overtures "Click Protection".

For a complete write up see Overture Click Protection Paper

Who would have thought...

[Anonymous Coward]

...that in the future we would be counting the number of times the microswitch in a mouse was clicked, and exchanging money based on it.

click-fraud? huh?

[Karma Sucks]

would it hurt the submitter to at least explain what the hell click-fraud is?

if i use a keyboard to simulate a mouse-click, is that considered click-fraud?

if so, this could really put open source projects like GNOME Accessibility in a dicey situation! ;)

It hurts publishers too

[Anonymous Coward]

I am a Adsense publisher, which means I show thier ads on my site. I earn quite good money (more than two thousand US dollars a month) for doing next to nothing. What concerns me is that they say "oh poor advertisers" when publishers get just as hurt.

1) You can loose, a lot, of revenue because of advertisers switching off.
2) You can void all your earnings if Google detects fradulant clicks (say a compeditor clicks the hell out of your ads).

It does suck for publishers and advertisers, but as it is one of Google's (and others) major revenue sources then I would have thought they would take even more measures to make sure this kind of fraud didn't happen. Because at the end of the day they do rely on both publishers and advertisters. And if it turns to crap Google (etc) will no longer be the middle man.

Re:It hurts publishers too

[paul.schulz]

The relevance of the advertising also needs to be improved, making them more useful then they currently are. If they 'added more value' to the site for the publisher, then maybe they would be used more, and abused less.

Suggestion:

I am an Adsense publisher for a local community based website.

I would like visitors to see advertising on my site with is relevent to my intended target audience. This could be done by allowing the publisher to add additional keyworks to the Adsence search. (eg. locality name)

Re:It hurts publishers too

[Eric Giguere]

Given that the majority of Google's revenues come from advertising, I think it's safe to say that they're devoting resources (and brainpower) to fixing this problem. The nice thing about AdSense is that it lets small website owners like myself get rewarded for putting up free content with no real hassle on anyone's part. It complements the open source model in my mind.

Most AdSense sites don't earn a lot of money, but it can easily pay your hosting costs if you get enough traffic. Sometimes you hit a lucky jackpot and make more. It would be interesting to see a breakdown of Google's advertising revenues to see how many clicks come through AdSense versus through sponsored links on the search results pages, but I doubt we'll ever see that kind of detail.

Eric
Who is writing a book about AdSense

Re:It hurts publishers too

[mabu]

Does participating in adsense improve your web site's ranking in Google's search engine?

Re:It hurts publishers too

[the_womble]

Google says no.

Logs seem to show two different spiders from google, one of which is supposed to be the adsense one, the other the search one.

Re:It hurts publishers too

[Anonymous Coward]

If it doesn't today, you can bet it will tomorrow. MAXIMIZE SHAREHOLDER VALUE

Re:It hurts publishers too

[Anonymous Coward]

Proving nothing.

Re:It hurts publishers too

[ArtStone]

I'm both a publisher and an advertiser on similar keywords. Back when they were starting this up, giving the ability of the web site to target the adsense ads was one of the recurring themes in the focus group - but that notion runs counter to the way Google thinks / works. If you have a web site for "Tupelo Mississipi", that should be obvious to Adsense from the content of the web site. If people could steer Adsense, they might start targeting high $ value keywords (but unrelated to the web site)

A few months ago, they created the "Ad Sense Preview Tool" which shows you which ads -would- have been displayed on the page if you had it turned on.

One thing that became very apparent is that you can focus Adsense based on recognizable words -IN- the URL, even if they are unused fluff in the GET string:

http://acme.org/frame123.php?id=5&desc=Britney-S pe ars-Naked-Posters

You've probably noticed that each time someone clicks an ad on your page, Mediaparters GoogleBot comes right behind (or maybe first) in order to do a quick scan of the page for relevance, and probably for detecting click fraud [guess]. If you used a technique like the above, you're enabling it to focus the ads on a page that AdSense hasn't seen before (Adsense was designed for static content pages)... the page better actually have something to do with Britney Spears Posters...

What about folks who play by the rules?

[xmas2003]

While most of the slashdotters laughed at my christmas lights/webcam hoax, there were a handful (probably fueled by the insinuations in the press reporting) that claimed I cleaned up on my Google Adsense Ads. Nothing could be further from the truth (I'm not quiting my day job!) which I document in my media updates and I was operated totally by the rules of the program as documented in my two cents on Google Adsense.

So while YES, there is a lot of fraud in this area, be careful about saying everyone running Google Adsense is "bad"

Re:What about folks who play by the rules?

[bigberk]

interesting stuff... I didn't know the lights thing was a hoax. As for AdSense, I am happy with its performance (and I have used banner type ads over the years). It makes me a bit of money, it's honest, and the ads are not intrusive so I really have zero complaints.

Re:What about folks who play by the rules?

[Anonymous Coward]

If you made money off the hoax or not, you're still an asshole. :)

Re:What about folks who play by the rules?

[xmas2003]

Gotta love Anonymous Coward's who express such strong opinions with such big words ... ;-)

Business Model

[karniv0re]

Newsweek also mentions Google suing a Texas company for placing the AdSense code and then clicking on it in order to run up the revenue.

1. Place AdSense code
2. Click
3. ???
4. Profit!
5. Goto step 2.

comment post

[CmdrTostado]

from the site We encourage users to post their referral link online, but will not tolerate users who "mass-post" on the internet.

Google ranking

[Anonymous Coward]

May not be related to the click advertising, but just so those of you running web servers are aware, one thing I've discovered is that Google puts a heavy penalty on sites that use no-archive tags.

I've been using it on pages for several sites because the content changes often, googlebot doesn't visit often, and we don't want the googlecache showing out-dated info. Also, it appears that googlecache now includes images, so it is entirely possible for individuals to visit a site, and no hits be registered in the web logs at all (I'm aware of excluding googlebot from image directories, I'm talking about something else). And there are other downsides, legitimate downsides, to allowing google to cache a site. Web site owners should have control over their own sites, without being excluded from the number one search engine on the internet, should they not?

I'm guessing that the no-index tag is used by sites that obfuscate and find ways around google's pageranking by cheating/spamming/cloaking or whatever other methods they use, so that's why google is penalizing sites with these tags. Or possibly, google can't cache the site, so they penalize it because otherwise it would affect google's claimed or actual search speed? If this is the reason, then they are contradicting their own mantra, of do no evil. Whatever the reason, be aware that no-index tags will penalize your site into oblivion. The method they appear to be using as the penalty is to remove any links from other sites to your site, so that your site doesn't receive any benefit from the highly touted "word-of-mouth" or whatever they call it, how your page/site ranks on other sites. I've been able to figure this out from a site where I missed adding the no-index tags to a couple of pages, and they rank better than other pages that should rank even higher. And the site doesn't show up at all when doing a link search, when in fact it is linked to from other highly ranked and highly trafficked sites. Some pages don't rank at all, a few rank in the low 200's, some rank even lower (higher number). Meanwhile on other search engines (Yahoo, askJeeves, MSN, Teoma, many others) the site comes in near the top 10-20 in most of the key word and phrase searches for the relevant categories to which the site would be a perfect fit for the search terms. And it looks like Google doesn't credit anything to how often or frequently someone clicks on your site when it does show up in results, as compared to other sites. Which is strange. Wouldn't you rank a site higher if everyone clicks on it first or click on it at all regardless of where on the page of results you show up?

I've thought about purchasing some google adwords so that they remove whatever penalty they are imposing when they review the site, but for them to review the site, it costs $299 last time I checked for the google adwords first time purchase, and it is unknown if they would actually remove the penalty. And the click fraud is the main reason for not purchasing the adwords (the other is the high cost to start with review, before you know if it is worth it or not).

Re:Google ranking

[spike2131]

I don't know where you got $299 to set up adwords from. That must have been a long time ago. When I set up adwords 3 months ago, it cost $5. Plus, of course, the cost of the ads.

Re:Google ranking

[grazzy]

Man, what are you ranting about? Google doesnt "review" sites. And its not 299 to use google adwords....

Re:Google ranking

[Anonymous Coward]

I run a an 80s music website, and I have used the no-archive tags for years.. Yet, if you google up "weasel 80s" (no quotes) my site is the first one returned!

I have AdSense on my page, along with a sneaky PHP script I wrote which grabs my earned AdSense revenue and displays it at the bottom of the skyscraper. And no, I have never paid for my rank.. My site has a 4.0 pagerank last time I checked, and I've never resorted to "optimization" or any of that stuff.. I've just focused on making the dynamic content of my site into good quality content. I think that's what REALLY determines the relevance of a page in the search engines.. ;)

--Weasel Who Can Never Remember His Slashdot Login

comment post

[CmdrTostado]

from the site Predominately promotional messages must not be posted to bulletin boards, discussion forums, guestbooks, Usenet newsgroups, or any other .....

Re:comment post was supposed to be sig post

[CmdrTostado]

it's late.

Click fraud example

[mrkitty]

Step 1 setup a website Step 2 click on the link Example: Go to www.cgisecurity.com and click on the banners! Step 3 gain karma on slashdot :p

Re:Click fraud example

[Anonymous Coward]

Done.

Re:comment post was supposed to be sig post

[CmdrTostado]

it's late (this comment modified to make it original).

Hilarity ensues!

[davew2040]

To me, it's absolutely hilarious that much time and money is being spent to figure out how to improve a business model that's fundamentally idiotic.

Re:Hilarity ensues!

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree - albiet in the cowardly fashion :P

Re:Hilarity ensues!

[spike2131]

I've made thousands of dollars off of that particular business model. Who's the idiot?

Re:Hilarity ensues!

[Jesus IS the Devil]

Meanwhile, businesses are making money while you're still out of a job. Who's the idiot?

Re: Hilarity ensues!

[Black Parrot]

> To me, it's absolutely hilarious that much time and money is being spent to figure out how to improve a business model that's fundamentally idiotic.

Don't have an MBA, do you.

Re:Hilarity ensues!

[Anonymous Coward]

So what? Money comes, and money goes. It doesn't make it legitimate or really mean anything.

There are people who will do anything for money. It's really hillarious. They think it will make them happy or something, while they're only chasing the shadow of happiness.

Re:Hilarity ensues!

[idlake]

It will be less hilarious when these idiots go to Congress and have various legal restrictions put on clicking on web pages "because their business model is threatened". Apparently, these days, you come up with a stupid business model and then whine until Congress fixes all the loopholes.

Re:Hilarity ensues!

[Anonymous Coward]

You sir are an idiot. Let me guess... you are unemployed?

Web abhors ads

[Anonymous Coward]

Every ad technique I have seen in nine years of working on a ad-supported major web site has been made obsolete by one of the following:

1. Deemed abhorrent by users (giant banner ads, popups)

2. Blocked (all banners)

Frauded (any bid/click model).

There isn't anything these sites can really do about click fraud, this isn't a case of software creating clicks but real humans in a sweatshop. Its impossible to determine if an ad is being delivered to a viable user. Impossible.

For some firms, they will just live with it, but many others will become seriously disillusioned. Ultimately the major sites will have to go to a monthly fee if they want to survive.

Why must clicks generate immidaite sales?

[fermion]

I simply never understood why the metric for web ads are so different from the metric for all other media ads. I mean in newspapers and television and magazines, the advertisers pays for the potential to reach the viewing or subscriber base. It is possible to guess how good these campaigns are doing, but the continuation of the campaign is often based on demographics, not how many people come in and say, hey, I saw your ad on Survivor and wanted to pick up your product. Advertisers want to create a personal connection to the consumer, and this is done by sponsoring content the target consumer desires.

Now it could be said that web advertising is more like direct mail. A firm pays an ad agency to create copy, the post office to send stuff out, and hopes for enough responses to the campaign to generate the profit. If the campaign fails, maybe the ad agency receives some flack. But the post office is not going to refund money because several hundred of the recipients happened to work for a competitor, or because a third of the envelopes were discarded unopened.

So where did this concept of one click one sale, or one click one payment. What happened to the concept of sponsoring good content in the hopes of generating a connection to potential customers. By all accounts TV and print ads are increasingly worthless. Can web ads be any worse? Could the problem be that the ad agencies or advertisers are not taking time to understand the medium? Are all web advertisers so fly by night that they need a sale today because tomorrow they will have run off to tahiti with the receipts?

Re:Why must clicks generate immidaite sales?

[duffbeer703]

I agree... I always found it amusing that web addresses are all over the place on billboards, magazines and newspapers, but I have to click on a web advertisement to figure out what company is peddling what.

When you see an "Eat at Joe's" sign next to a train station that you walk through every day, you're more likely to eat there. Likewise, there needs to be a category of web advertisement that builds a brand based on a logo or catchy graphic.

Hell... drug companies advertise and sell drugs without even telling you what the drug does!

Re:Why must clicks generate immidaite sales?

[michaelhood]

These other media advertisements are based on CPM or "Impressions". You know upfront how much this campaign is going to cost. This is more like paying to have packages (AOL CDs? Apartment magazines?) made, and leaving them out to be distributed in a public venue. Now one of your competitors wanders along, and takes 50, with no intention to make use of the content. Whether this is theft or not is for a different discussion, but I hope this analogy brings it closer to Apples to Apples at least.

Re:Why must clicks generate immidaite sales?

[snilloc]

Often, these drugs allow you to do such things as throw a football through a hanging tire.

"bow-chicka-wah-wah".

Re:Why must clicks generate immidaite sales?

[white_wolf21]

While I agree with your general post, I don't think the situation is really the same as direct mail. After all, the people performing the click-fraud don't just "happen" to click the ad like they may happen to receive direct mail. It's more like they go to the post office and grab all the direct mail marketing themselves, thus stopping the ads from even getting to the intended audience. And surely the post office should have to take precautions to avoid this.

Re:Why must clicks generate immidaite sales?

[Rich0]

Hell... drug companies advertise and sell drugs without even telling you what the drug does!

This is a somewhat unique phenomenon which is the result of advertising regulations in the industry.

Drug ads are required to be balanced, so to the extent that they tell you about a drug's benefits, they also have to tell you about its side-effects.

Sometimes this borders on the absurd - most drugs have some significant side-effects, but there are a few where it is questionable whether the effects are actually genuine or statistical noise. Nevertheless, when you hear an ad for such a drug you get a long litany of every disease known to man - basically the same litany you might hear for a drug with serious side effects. As a result, consumers can't really tell which drug is safer. In an ideal world, of course, the doctor will be able to help out there, but most consumers aren't going to take time off work and pay cash to visit a doctor to ask about the latest ad unless they aren't taking treatment at all. (And, in many cases, the doctor just prescribes drugs based on who gives them the biggest kickbacks - I had a friend who was a pharma sales rep, and she was shocked when a doctor openly said that he wouldn't prescribe the drugs she was peddling unless she got him tickets or other perks.)

In any case, the logic is that if you don't talk about the benefits of a drug at all, you don't have to mention much at all about its downside. Advertisers have even gone a step further with branding so that they can run ads which don't even suggest that they're advertising a drug (do you know what the "purple pill" is? Half of its ads drop the "pill" part and just have people excited about purple backdrops...).

Re:Why must clicks generate immidaite sales?

[spike2131]

Clicks should generate immediate sales... because they can.

If you see an ad for McDonalds, and your aren't at a McDonalds, there is nothing you can do about it at that moment. Maybe, if McDonalds is lucky, you will remember their branding and go eat there later. Maybe not.

When you are on the internet, however, you are generally able to make a purchase right then and there, from your computer. So why then shouldn't sales be the goal? Unlike branding, they provide immediate revenue, and immediate, measurable feedback as to how your how your advertising campaign is doing.

Branding is nice, but really its just a means of keeping something in a consumers mind until they are ready to give you a sale. Thats why its much more lucrative to skip directly to the sale.

Re:Why must clicks generate immidaite sales?

[Jtheletter]

You make an excellent point, and I agree completely that the idea that every click (or at least a majority) should lead to a sale is as ludicrous as the RIAA's stance that every pirated mp3 is a lost sale.

In addition to your points I think the advertisers also need to take into account the nature of users in this medium. Most of the time when I'm on the web I have a specific goal - reading slashdot, finding pictures of something, etc, etc. So when there's a keyword ad in the middle of the articel I'm reading, even if I'm interested I'm probably not going to suspend what I'm doing right that minute to buy some new RAM or whatever it is they're selling. Personally I keep a set of folders for items I'm looking for, and as I find good dealers in my travels through the web I bookmark them for later. Point is, I shop when I'm on the web to shop, and if I'm already doing something else then nothing short of an outrageous clearance of some sort is going to make me buy the product immediately after discovering an ad.

Re:Why must clicks generate immidaite sales?

[duffbeer703]

You just made my point -- branding the most important function of advertising. That's why Oracle owns the back cover of every free IT magazine.

Re:Why must clicks generate immidaite sales?

[Rich0]

I couldn't agree more - I've on many occassions questioned why ads are pay-per-click. When was the last time you clicked on a billboard? You'd be stupid to think that billboards don't have an effect, however.

Stick it to the mortgage industry

[Anonymous Coward]

Clicking on the word "Mortgage" when doing a Google search costs the advertiser close to $20 (especially for the top positions). Next time you want to spend a bunch of money, just do that. It feels quite powerful.

Re:Stick it to the mortgage industry

[krislyn]

The next time you want to feel powerful, why don't you take some food down to a local food back and help a family who can't put food on their table for their kids. That's power.

pay-per-click model generally obsolete

[mabu]

I've never liked the pay-per-click model.

It only really has value to a few select portals that have market share. Everybody else gets screwed. The pay-per-click model also compensates for advertisers' lack of innovation or foresight. If their ad message sucks, they don't pay, yet they consume prime real estate that could be better served by a more thoughtful advertiser unwilling to merely randomy throw money around in impractical bid amounts. So with this model, web sites lose revenue because of an advertiser's incompetence.

It will be a better day when all pay-per-click advertising disappears. It doesn't serve anyone well.

Re:pay-per-click model generally obsolete

[Hentai]

It's another prisoner's dilemna, though - it doesn't serve anyone well, but at the same time it causes any OTHER behavior to serve people even LESS well.

Re:pay-per-click model generally obsolete

[PostScience]

I think that google allocates "real estate" based on total revenue generated per visit, not CPC. So, if you bid for a high CPC, but you don't get any clicks, your ad won't necessarily be displayed more often.

Who clicks ads on purpose?

[Sophrosyne]

It seems almost shocking to me that people are clicking on these ads, and some are actually buying the products or services.
I guess I am just being naive and ignoring impulse shopping, but I can't imagine someone seeing an ad and actually purchasing a product without putting any real thought into it.
I am so thankful for things like Adblock, it helps bring back some sanity to the web.

Re:Who clicks ads on purpose?

[Technician]

After the Slashdot article on VOIP, you didn't click on a Vontage ad? I did. I clicked on a bunch of competitors ads.

Sometimes a well placed ad is good. Unfortunately ads in general like spam. Lots of useless products that take next to $0 to produce.

Finding a valid ad for a reputible product has become difficult due to the bad S/N ratio.

If I want to re-Finance, I start with my Credit Union. I know they have been in business for a while and their reputation is established.

Getting the same from some random online advertiser is a shot in the dark.

Re:Who clicks ads on purpose?

[Anonymous Coward]

You are not your boss.

shut your

[Anonymous Coward]

shut your cake hole and RTFA.
mod parent down.

Re:shut your

[fyngyrz]

It's not "cake hole", it's "keg hole." You know, where they drive in the bung (what you probably think of as the "cork") You want to say: "Shut your keg hole!"

If you're going to be abusive, at least get it right. :)

Google Adwords work because they're non-intrusive

[Rares Marian]

I would much rather click on a nice google ad than a hyperactive bouncing you may hve won a pc with a virus that could be running twice as fast if you install cpurocket with antispyware suite of free ipods.

WRONG, WRONG WRONG!

[Spy der Mann]

>click fraud is the bane of the search advertising industry

Click fraud is the bane of the USELESS CLICK-THRU ADVERTISING industry. Use targetted banners, of both online and offline products. Get smarter, dammit.

If I see a coke ad on a hot sunny day, i'm more eager to buy it than to click a stupid "punch the monkey" ad.

How about this. In say, long scientific article, who the heck will pay attention to a banner on the top of the page, rather than in the middle?

Common sense, boys. You wanted instant revenue. There's no such thing.

Re:WRONG, WRONG WRONG!

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you have any experience in advertising? I do... PPC works, a lot better then banner ads. PPC ads ARE targetted... I would go on but it's useless to educate someone who already thinks they know everything.

Re:WRONG, WRONG WRONG!

[Anonymous Coward]

When anyone tries to do targetted banners the privacy advocates have a heart attack. Just look at Doubleclick.

Re:WRONG, WRONG WRONG!

[khrtt]

Then don't target them by collecting personal information. There are other ways.

Re:WRONG, WRONG WRONG!

[Spy der Mann]

I do... PPC works, a lot better then banner ads. PPC ads ARE targetted...

Like "warning! Your computer is insecure! Click here to fix" or... "shoot the monkey!" or... "Click here to shut up this vocal flash ad".

Obviously those are PPC. Don't tell me they're targeted.

Addition

[michaelhood]

I meant to also include that packages that were not picked up by customers could be reclaimed by the advertiser for use in another campaign, etc. These advertisers put out enough packages so the shelves won't be empty, although they don't expect 100% of the packages to be taken.

Back in the day...

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone remember those "paid to surf/look at ads" schemes that used to be all the rage... until a few people wrote some programs to keep the mouse active and the pennies flowing.... good times.

Re:Back in the day...

[kyoko21]

Would you be referring to AllAdvantage.com? :-) I was one of those few individuals who got a couple hundred dollars from that. Yay! Too bad the checks stop coming in :-(

Re:click-fraud? huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

RTFA dumbass

New Search engine Snap.com Solves this problem

[adamontherun]

Bill Gross's new startup Snap.com has a great new advertising model that solves the click fraud program.

They offer traditonal online advertising options such as charging for the number of times a listing is displayed, and a pay-per-click model (That Gross originally pioneered with Overture).

Snap's big contribution to online advertising is "Pay-Per-Action". They track a user's click-stream from their search engine, to the site, and track a user's movements there. So a bookseller can agree to pay 2% of sales for leads from Snap. Or Friendster could agree to pay $.25 per new subscriber.

This has two big advantages over PPC. It 100% eliminates click fraud. It also eliminates risk to the merchant, there's no more wondering what percentage of PPC visitors will convert to sales.

More on Snap.com at my blog IAmAdamSmith

Our team at online travel startup TripInvite.com plan to start a "Pay per Action" campaign after we launch later this month. Other travel sites signed with Snap are paying about 2 to 3% right now.

Re:New Search engine Snap.com Solves this problem

[Ars-Fartsica]

They track a user's click-stream from their search engine, to the site, and track a user's movements there

Until their cookies are blocked, that is.

Re:New Search engine Snap.com Solves this problem

[wk633]

What is left out of the equation is simply building brand recognition. It's not often I will click on an add, but I might remember the name and go back later when I have the need and the time.

Re:New Search engine Snap.com Solves this problem

[Serveert]

Most reputable affiliate networks have "PPA".. they call it "CPA" in this industry and it's been around for a long time.. Try commission junction for example.

People have dealt with fraud since the 90's and some companies who pioneered this long before overture/google have fixed things so they can detect most fraud.

Google is relatively new and is just learning.

I think this is why CPM and Affiliate rules

[digitalgimpus]

CPM has the benefit of costing bandwidth. To show 100,000 CPM, it requires 100,000 pageviews. Provided the image is loaded off a 3rd party's server, you can check the IP, referrer (not a dummy page, but actual page on the site), and rate.

Affiliate doesn't get as many clicks... but actually translates into cash.

Problem is, per click is cheap. They hand out a penny (or fraction) each time they get a click. Easy to track, monitor.

But not an effective business practice.

IMHO these companies weren't well concieved. Poor business planning. You don't run a business if you can't validate your method of income.

What about this

[adeydas]

And that's why affilate programs are lot better for the companies than stuff like Google AdSense...

Screwing up adverts is great.

[shrewtamer]

Ok some adverts can provide a moments amusement, but on the whole they are a pain. While the google ads are (at the moment) quite unobtrusive (especially with an adblocker!) they are still part of an industry which is crying out for a bloody good kicking.

Ads accross wireless medium:
The airwaves belong to everyone. This is a limited resource so there has to be some regulation but we sure as hell don't want to piss it away on people trying to get their bullshit imagery into your head for their sordid profit.

Ads accross wires:
I don't know about the States but in the places I have lived the telecommunications networks were set up with public funding. It seems that most places have now privatised their telecommunications networks, state assets, belonging to all, being sold for a fraction of their true value for the benefit of the rich. With the advent of VOIP and large scale public adhoc wireless networking the business model of the telecommunications companies is no longer viable and this basic resource should be brought back into the public domain.

Bill boards / train adverts:
These things are nauseating. Why as human beings should we suffer this indignity? I'd prefer the raw sewage people used to throw onto the streets in Victorian times to the demeaning bullshit the advertiser assaults us with.

To sum it up......adverts STEAL our SUNSHINE.

Those of you who disagree with me will be pleased to know that I had to move to a small island in the Pacific to escape from all this...the universe is beautiful and the sun bestows its wealth on all!

Unfortunatley it looks like the political forces of the West have decided to lay waste to the world. One way or another all this advertising must stop.

Re:Screwing up adverts is great.

[Anonymous Coward]

It's people like you who are the true banes of society. Do you realize ads subsidize and offset a lot of costs for the consumer? Without ads you think Google would even bother to exist? Before you talk, think about all the consequences that come along with what you're hinting at.

It's people who think like you, people who think they're ENTITLED to be treated like royalty, who "STEAL our SUNSHINE".

Re:Screwing up adverts is great.

[Maow]

Do you realize ads subsidize and offset a lot of costs for the consumer?

Um, who do you think pays for those ads?

The owner of a chain of furniture stores once told me that the cost of advertising raises the retail cost by ~15%: Someone has to pay for those SuperBowl ads, glossy mag ads, billboards, etc. ad nauseum.

Re:Screwing up adverts is great.

[khrtt]

Do you realize ads subsidize and offset a lot of costs for the consumer?

Yeah, like Google and television. And not much else. Now, since we are paying for cable in any event, I doubt the cable company would have trouble surviving without the ad revenue. And as far as Google is concerned, there were search engines before anyone ever thought about running an internet company based on ad revenue. They got their money elsewhere. Also, Google is the only successful internet business with an ad-based revenue model. Dotcom is long dead, remember?

Oh, and don't forget, it's the consumer who ends up paying for the ad campaign, which more than offsets the offsets to the costs of the consumer that you are talking about.

If you ask me, all advertising should be made illegal. Starting with spam, of course. I doubt the economy would ever even notice. Of course, the parasites in the advertising industry will have to go find real jobs!

OK, enough trolling, time to go read "Das Kapital".

Re:Screwing up adverts is great.

[TractorBarry]

I totally agree.

Personally I'd like to see all internet advertising campaigns fail - utterly and completely. That way the people who treat the internet as digital TV can go and work in digital TV leaving the rest of us to get on with it.

And on a related note then in England you can join the Mailing Preference Service http://www.tpsonline.org.uk/mpsr/ which is supposed to stop you getting junk mail in the post.

However the Post Office seem to think that this doesn't apply to them and they still hand deliver various items of crud mail to you. So after politely asking them to stop and being told they wouldn't I now take all their junk mail and put it straight back in the nearest post office box.

Bah.

Re:Screwing up adverts is great.

[ajs318]

Do you realize ads subsidize and offset a lot of costs for the consumer?

Do you realise that the cost of advertising campaigns is borne by the consumer?

The more advertisements I see, the more I come to realise the BBC really is worth the licence fee.

Beware of the "Content" network in Adwords

[WoTG]

I've used google adwords for a couple small campaigns. I suspect that I've been a victim of "click fraud" on the content network -- that's where your ads appear on third party websites. However, on the Google search network, the only entity who directly benefits from clicks is Google themselves. I'm pretty comfortable with the traffic I get from the search clicks.

Yes, actually they will

[Anonymous Coward]

If you have never purchased advertising with google before, you can purchase a $299 campaign, and at the same time, someone from google will look over your site. Its a service to first time ad buyers. Others have speculated (unrelated to looking over the site as part of the $299 package) that once you start buying advertising on google, your ranking improves. They appear to be basing this on experience with actually purchasing ads, as speculated in webmaster forums and elsewhere. So some of the speculation is based on experience.

Is the fee still $299? Don't know, but I checked it a few months ago at most. Go through the menus that explain advertising for first time buyers, and you'll see the program I'm talking about.

You can get started with adwords for $5 as the other poster stated. But if you start with $5, you aren't a new user anymore, and therefore don't fit within the guidelines printed on google's site for someone there to look over your site. Don't know if they farm it out or not, but that's what they state. So you put up $299 up front, and get them to look at the site, or you start with $5, and still end up with a possible penalty for no-archive tags that don't get resolved, no links from other sites that aren't counted for ranking that may be part of the penalty for no-index tags, and so on.

Can you get started with $5? Maybe so. Probably. But according to google's own site, you need to meet the minimum threshold of $299 (iirc), and be a first-time purchaser for them to look at the site.

Re:Yes, actually they will

[spike2131]

So, an extra $294 for google to look at your site and say "nice site"? No thanks.

Re:click-fraud? huh?

[LardBrattish]

Not that I had ANYTHING to do with this except hear about it third hand but my understanding of click fraud is a Perl (or similar) script that spoofs IP addresses, visits web pages and "clicks" on ad banners with the intention of wasting a competitors advertising budget with useless clicks so that you can hoover up the keywords at a reduced price. e.g. The price of, say, Viagra in google adwords is dependent on time of day & a bidding system if I understand correctly so you've bid 10c/click while your competitor has bid 50c/click so they're getting all of the "action" but he's put a $100 cap on spending. so you invoke the script I just mentioned to blow away his $100 @ 50c/click then your 10c/click is the top bidder... Google gets paid but obviously they're unhappy because their customer's unhappy.

MOD PARENT DOWN

[gl4ss]

this does NOT solve the problem that someone creates a web site of his own, makes up some fantom traffic first and then takes up your adverts through somewhere - and then clicks through your paid-for click throughs to get revenue for himself.

it doesn't matter how good the description in your ad is - A clicking script is NOT going to be buying anything.

would you like to be paying per click by a script? I don't think so!

Re:MOD PARENT DOWN

[fyngyrz]

Google and crew will deal with the revenue trolls. It's fraud, it's detectable and fairly obvious. The technology is new, doesn't bother me at all. They'll get it handled. That's one smart bunch of folks over at Google. I am not moved to worry about this even a little. And yes, we use Google ads -- and they work extremely well for us.

What I was doing in the GP was answering the question the slashdot story poster asked -- where will ads go. That's where I think they'll go. No more, no less. Disagree? Fine, explain yourself. Not talking about the same thing as I am? Also fine, but not relevant to my post.

As for the silly "mod parent down" hysteria... Mod me any way you want, folks. I don't post for "karma" (it's useless anyway, moderation here is completely broken and metamoderation isn't much better -- see my journal) and I read at -1. I'm here because I like the format. Mod me right to -1, and enjoy the experience. It won't mean anything to me unless they fix the system. Heck, compared to slashdot's moderation system, Google is darned near perfect. :)

Re:MOD PARENT DOWN

[Anonymous Coward]

dude, your post had nothing whatsofuckingever to do with the topic of the the main post. You seem to care than you let on about the MOD PARENT DOWN if you are retaliating in kind...

Re:MOD PARENT DOWN

[miu]

Google and crew will deal with the revenue trolls. It's fraud, it's detectable and fairly obvious.

The people running these frauds are like spammers in 1996, abusing a technology newly available to the public - as google implements fixes the fraud-rings will develop new techniques and become as subtle as they have to be to avoid detection. Since they are criminals with an infinity of throw away identities they will be able to "probe" google's system to determine the fraud avoidance tolerances.

One scenario, fraud-rings approach legitimate content sites (a mod site, fansite, open source project, whatever) and offer to "enhance" their adsense revenue for a split of what they add. The fraud-ring rents time on zombie nets to add 15% (ramped up according to a schedule developed to avoid triggering fraud detection) in extra clicks from hijacked clients with no discernible pattern, the fraud-ring and the content provider split the extra money and google never twigs. The fact that the legitimate content site was probably already driving traffic makes them the perfect camouflage.

Re:MOD PARENT DOWN

[gl4ss]

the why i said that you should be modded down was that your "answer" to the problem was not an answer to the problem discussed by the article.

the problem is exaclty those phantom clickers that never buy anything, maybe some guys in india or wherever or some scripts. they're hard for google and for you in the end. and you CAN'T fight them off with accurate advertisements!

Re:MOD PARENT DOWN

[Anonymous Coward]

Google and crew will deal with the revenue trolls. It's fraud, it's detectable and fairly obvious. The technology is new, doesn't bother me at all. They'll get it handled. That's one smart bunch of folks over at Google. I am not moved to worry about this even a little. And yes, we use Google ads -- and they work extremely well for us.

I'm really glad their ads have worked for you. Personally, for our business, over the Christmas season, google barely broken even for us. I suspect a good deal of fraud was going on, but I can't prove it. I also suspect my competitors might have engaged in it to knock us out of the listings, that's another problem and as far as I know, google has not found a way to deal with it.

Maybe I'm just being paranoid, maybe for whatever reason, google ads for the product we sell just don't generate sales like they do for us on Yahoo, MSN, and a few other more niche sites. Our ads are honest, direct, to the point. Out of the close to 3000 hits we got through google during december, *3* of them turned into sales. On Yahoo, we generally have 6 of every 100 turn into sales, and MSN during december was even better.

Something shadey was going on, that's what my gut tells me, and unfortunately, as much as I love google and use it daily, I will not be advertising with them again any time soon. That was piss poor results. I'll let the big guys who can afford to weather the phoney clicks have it all(or what I suspect, the big guys who can afford to knock their mom and pop competitors advertising budget into the ground). I do much better with the other search engines for whatever reason. I'm sure part of it is because our products are targeted towards women, but still, 3 sales out of 3000 click throughs when our prices are some of the lowest? Something isn't right.

Worth mentioning, the click throughs that come from regular google search results are generally on par with our Yahoo results. Something fucking stinks about that.

Re:MOD PARENT DOWN

[fyngyrz]

You know, you might have some additional data; your web logs could show where those clicks came from, depending on how sophisticated the attack was. Have you done any mining to see where the incoming IP's are from?

Another thing. As you have good stats on ad response from Yahoo and etc, perhaps you should gather those up and present them to Google. Google waits before it pays ad-bearing sites (about 30 days after the close of the advertising month) and during that time, they can and will revise the payment to be made.

The reason that it might be worth your time to do this is that while it is possible for the spammers to obscure the incoming IP's (HTTP_REFERER) that you'll see in your logs, an attack has to come from just one or a relatively few sites -- and Google should know exactly where your clicks came from because while the HTTP_REFERER can be obscured, the ad placement probably can't -- I think that Google has to know where the ad bearing sites are in order to determine which ad to show. If one or just a few sites are providing the majority of your incoming traffic, and that traffic shows an HTTP_REFERER in your logs that isn't the actual referring site, then Google may elect to respond by invalidating the clicks.

If the HTTP_REFERER is not fake in this case, then you may have a pointer right to the problem site. If that's the case, Google may be able to block them from using your ad (I know that the ad-carrier can block any particular ad -- this is just Google enforcing the same thing.)

Even if you're going to skip Google from now on, I'd still pursue the issue. Perhaps you can get your $$$ back, and inflict a financial wound on the attackers. If Google figures out what is going on in your case, they'll probably figure out what is going on in other cases.

There's (probably) another clue for Google once they look into this -- ads are pretty dependable in the sense that they pull a particular percentage of the viewing public. Looking at our ad stats, they're pretty darned steady, really. If your ads show a huge spike, I would think they'd take that into account.

Anyway, I'd encourage you to pursue this. Google's been very good with us; my impression is that they'll try to do the right thing.

Re:MOD PARENT DOWN

[Anonymous Coward]

Thank you very much for your reply. I probably should have thought about this deeper, but with all the work going on... Anyways, I am going to follow your suggestions. I REALLY appreciate your reply. Take care.

Other ways publishers hurt CPC

[CABAN]

Another problem with programs like adsense are publishers developing websites specifically for CPC and no real content.

Search for Bulk Email

[grahamsz]

I used to have a perl script that went to overture few hours, searched for bulk email, and clicked on each of the results.

Overture used to display how much the advertizer would pay for every single click, and lots of them were over $10.

I'm not sure if it actually worked or not, but in theory i cost the UCE industry about a half a million dollars - sadly that went to overture who aren't much more reputable.

Use a weighted average

[PFritz21]

Maybe more weight should be given to advertising clicks that actually result in sales.

Re:Use a weighted average

[ArtStone]

Google recently added conversion tracking to AdWords, so they're already thinking that way. At this point, the conversion tracking is there for feedback for an advertiser who doesn't know / want to build their own covnersion tracking system.

But you can be sure the conversion data is going back into a statistics database to pick up differences in quality of various traffic sources.

CPC = mecca for fraud

[Serveert]

since i might work with a competitor who actually is bigger than ad sense I can't talk about alternatives :)

where ?

[chrisranjana.com]

"Meanwhile, merchants like Assaf Nehoray are taking their money elsewhere, getting abundant clicks, but no real revenue on Internet advertising campaigns."

Exactly where he is taking his money ? I mean what are the other alternatives to drive targetted clicks to your website ?

Look to the porn industry..

[Archon-X]

When affiliate programs took off in the adult world, it was very common for them to PPC.

Obviously, fraud was a major problem, so most programs changed to PPS (Pay Per Signup) - meaning there had to be a qualified signup for the affiliate to be credited.

You have to look very hard to find a good PPC sponsor these days. The industry evolved. I guess it's time for Google & PPC et al to catch up.

Re:Look to the porn industry..

[Anonymous Coward]

PPC in affiliate programs do still exist but in very smaller numbers. The rules were changed so you must make a sale for every 100 clicks or so or you don't get paid.

With that most affiliates decided to do the PPS program instead.

The PPS model is also having problems right now as not all sponsors are big enough to be able to payout as much to affiliates.

Check this Program Analysis for JasonandAlex.com:
http://www.jasonandalex.com/analysis/analysis.html

What about the old school way

[camcloud1]

Print media sell advertising depending on the position of the ad and how long the advertiser wants to run the ad in their publication. Television sells ads in a similar way - when the ad runs (timeslot) and how long for. Accuracy is limited to the nearest 1000 or so. This method has been tried to limited success in favour of the "absolute" accuracy of CPC - which has now turned into a joke. I think the only way for all parties to agree is to convert website traffic using the old method. Charge for the time and position only of ads. The amount you charge is based on traffic numbers as a whole but not individual page views or clicks. Just like TV and print media who can't tell exactly how many people looked at an advertisement but given the numbers and length of time the ad runs it gives you a pretty good idea.

I'm glad there's so much ignorance on Slashdot

[centipetalforce]

Frankly I'm actuall glad there's so much "PPC is teh sucK" ignorance going on here. Less competitors for me.

Re:I'm glad there's so much ignorance on Slashdot

[Anonymous Coward]

Frankly I'm actuall glad there's so much "PPC is teh sucK" ignorance going on here. Less competitors for me.

And if you go into business selling dried dogshit you'll find you have no competitors at all!

With the added benefit that it probably won't stink as bad as your current business model!

Views but no revenue

[zmollusc]

Maybe the clicking not turning into sales is an indicator that advertising doesn't work? Normal crappy advertising doesn't have this easily measured feedback, the advertising companies just make some figures up to justify their big fees. "Yeah, we increased your market share 5% against an overall decline in the shifting demographic since 9/11 , therefore give us more money."
Every day I see ads for crap that I could easily afford to change to, but I don't. I am sticking with Kodos.

Re:Views but no revenue

[Anonymous Coward]

Well AdWords works, I profit $30k/year from porn sponsors websites with a great ROI (Return On Investment).

You just have to know what the fuck you are doing and be prepared to waste a few $1k before you get the hand of it and learn to do it correct. There are a lot of books and material out there.

Re:Views but no revenue

[zmollusc]

What? You pay someone else to advertise your porn and this attracts customers for you who pay you money for your porn? Really?

The Plight Of The Wrongly Accused; David v Goliath

[jtcedinburgh]

One of the sites I'm involved with had AdSense for around 9 months and it brought in a reasonable, honest income stream of around $400 per month. Then, without warning, Google removed our publisher status - without giving us reason. They are infuriatingly unwilling to work with us to identify what went wrong; my suspicion is that we were targetted by some kind of competitor who 'over-clicked' and made it look like us - but Google won't tell us anything. IP addresses, times, dates, routes, whatever; just something that could help us understand what went wrong. In fact, their reluctance to talk to us makes me suspicious that Google the publicly traded corporation has turned to the use of underhand tactics to off-load some smaller publishers such as us; we published but did not advertise with Google in return, and I suspect they saw us as ultimately not profitable enough for their corporate greed. I like Google the search engine, but I think we were unfairly treated. If I felt that a court would rule in our favour to allow us access to the details of whatever 'crime' we have been deemed to have committed, I would seriously consider going down that route because: (a) If the undisclosed abuse was internal I could find out who and when, and take some sort of wrist-slapping action. This is doubtful, though; I basically ran the site and was the only one associated with the account and I *know* damn well that I played by the rules. (b) If the undisclosed abuse was external then we could fight our corner for re-instatement and possibly take action against the abuser, and seek back-payments (which were withheld) from Google plus some sort of compensation for their negligence in handling the matter properly. However, all that said and done, I think Google thinks it is above the law and in all probability it is (relative to my small outfit) as it will have immensely deeper pockets. The real shame is that the AdSense programme was working for us, and we were getting relevant ads which our site membership found useful. Google, you have soiled your image and tarnished my impression of you as a trustworthy, decent organisation. At least as far as your AdSense department is concerned. Your bully-boy approach reeks of a lack of ethics and I hope that you might learn something from my case and (I should imagine) the countless other sites who have been tarred unnecessarily and unfairly. I'm sure someone else will come on and sing Google AdSense's praises, but remember my words on the day that Google suddenly stops being your friend and starts to regard you as untrustworthy without giving you details of what they deem as your 'crime'. Mark my words... I post this as myself because I stand beside my words and my certainty that Google f**ked up but isn't decent enough to let us prove it. jtc

It's a losing battle

[Anonymous Coward]

It may not be as easy as you initially believe. You suggest cookies, but what about browsers disabling cookies?

Session id's: Id on what? A HTTP-request is just that, there's no session.

How about using IP you say: what about spoofed packets and zombie machines?

The list goes on and on.. The result is pretty simple: You CAN'T know who is sending you HTTP-traffic.

Especially when someone attempts to gauge your "filter" or system, it's a losing battle.

I agree with you, it's a joke, but in another way. Technically, you can't fix this without making it too hard to view the ads. SHTTP? Forget it.

It's a joke as long as there are people in the world who can make a living on these pennies being exchanged in a virtual economy. It's a joke that we accept being brainwashed daily by commercials intruding everywhere, and them actually having any value! It's a joke we're wasting time on this.

Commercials ought to fade out. People should make informed buying decisions based on what THEY need, not what advertisers want them to buy.

Re:It's a losing battle

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually my beef was that they hit you for clicking on your own links or those of your competitors inside their manager.

Re: Sewage?!

[L.Bob.Rife]

I'd prefer the raw sewage people used to throw onto the streets in Victorian times to the demeaning bullshit the advertiser assaults us with.

You prefer raw sewage over billboards? I hate billboards too, but at least they don't spread cholera and track feces into my living room.

Old problem, no good solutions

[bpgs]

This problem is as old as the commercial Internet, and is very hard to solve. See for example this paper from the 8th World Wide Web Conference (1999). http://www.pinkas.net/PAPERS/v17.htm

Exactly, relevance is the key

[blorg]

While I ignore the Google ads when I'm searching for information, I do look at them when I'm looking for somewhere to buy a product. When I'm looking to *buy*, Adwords are often even more relevant than the search results themselves. I have clicked through, and I have bought from advertisers. It's a win-win situation.

We run Adwords ourselves, and are very careful to word the ads so that they appeal to the people searching, with clear facts about what we offer. Google further help the relevance themselves by automatically removing ads that don't get a certain minimum click-through (although this minimum is very low at 0.5%)

On your Finnish point - Google allows a high degree of geographical segmentation for the ads, further increasing their relevance. The ad you clicked on would have been running in Finland, but not elsewhere. We are limited to the geographical area of Ireland, and are very careful to mention that we are Irish in the ad. This really makes us stand out from all the irrelevant foreign advertisers, and indeed our domestic competitors who don't make their location clear (the product isn't one that tends to ship internationally.)

Result is a very high percentage click-through (up to 20%) and people find what they're looking for. A win-win situation.

Re:English may be a second language to you...

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, I'm sorry. While I'm out with friends and you're stuck flipping burgers and cleaning out the grease trap for a living perhaps I'll give a thought to hiring you as my personal "care about spelling" person, because they are oh-so hard to find on the internet. I'll pay you 7 cents an hour (which is 7 times your current salary). What do ya say?

Sorry to say

[tod_miller]

I wanted to ask google, what happens if I click an ad twice... If I am on a nice site, I click all the google ads. You should do the same.

Why doesn't slashdot have any... *looks at ad block, feels guilty* ... well they should put google ads up, i'd click them every day, and even look at the sites... doesn't google ads make sense on /.? (I am always in lynx mode... so maybe in funny ugly graphics mode there are some??)

Also, if I see a M$ related advert, I middle click a good twenty times, and then shut down my browser session.

It is all good. I love google adsense.

broken business model

[ajs318]

Paying just to get people to click on your advert, regardless of whether or not they actually buy anything, is a broken business model.

As far as I am concerned -- and I am sure I am not the only one who feels this way -- every single advertisement anyone tries to show me is unwanted. In fact, I may well decide never to buy any product or service from that company just on general principle. After all, I know that company spends money on advertising which they could spend on making a better product. So if you have ever spent a single penny trying to show me an advertisement, then you have wasted that money. Harsh? Maybe, but that's the way you turn out when you were raised watching the BBC.

I won't be guilt-tripped with talk of how advertisers pay for this and pay for that. I never asked them to pay for it! I am the sole custodian of my destiny. I am not going to buy anything from anybody who advertises, period. I personally see no need to waste my bandwidth downloading an advertisement when I am only going to ignore it -- hence the Squid proxy and moderate-to-heavy use of Firefox's image blocking feature. Not just on the Internet either; I leave the room while adverts are on the TV.

If I was feeling really malicious, I might actually write a quick perl script to put in a few hundred bogus clicks against a really egregious advertiser. But on the whole, I most probably wouldn't be bothered; it's too much effort for too little return.

Re:broken business model

[elfin_spectre]

Wow, if that's the case (and you're consistent) then where do you shop? Obviously not a big supermarket because they advertise? But those small shop stock a lot of brand-name goods that you can't buy because their adverts are on the TV all the time.

What about travel? I can't think of a car company that doesn't advertise so you obviously don't drive. Rail companies advertise so you can't take the train. Second-hand bicycle maybe.

You have a Radical philosophy

It is all in the pattersn

[iconnor]

Yes, a few people like you will click around looking.

However, if you get users that are clicking thousands of sites, and just buring through clicks on totally random sites, this would be cause for concern.

However, I tend to agree that it is a flawed business model. There is no real way to guarantee that a users is real and not a bot.

It will be interesting to see if all this will impact on google's revenue.

Re:It is all in the pattersn

[Eric Giguere]

This is also a problem for impression-based advertising, but it's magnified with pay-per-click advertising. I'm sure Google is working hard to minimize it. I don't think it will ever go away completely.

CPM Subject to fraud too

[richyoung]

Unfortunately, per-view advertising is every bit as vulnerable to fraud as PPC advertising. It simply requires a slightly different action from the trained monkey operating the mouse.

What's different between them is the motive the fraudster (and here, I mean the person paying the click farm, not the individual clickers) has for their actions. In PPC fraud, the intention is to cost the competition money by running up the number of clicks they have to pay for, thereby driving them out of the market and protecting your advertising turf. In CPM/per-view advertising, the "per thousand" factor means that it's much more likely being done to benefit the seller of the ads than to hurt the buyer of the ads.

The only reason the web has problems like this is that we have to deal with the myth of finally having hard numbers about ad performance. The print/broadcast/outdoor advertising industries have always used numbers that ended in at least three zeroes when they describe the exposure your ad provides, because they couldn't be more accurate than that.

Super-Size-Ads

[fnord_uk]

Having watched the film "Super-Size-Me" yesterday, I started wondering if MacDonalds use this form of advertising.

I found a sponsored link to: www.supersizeme-thedebate.co.uk by googling for "macdonalds".

http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=macdonalds&start= 0&start=0&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&client=firefox-a&rls=o rg.mozilla:en-US:official

Its got the golden arches logo on it, and certainly looks like it carries the corporate point of view.

So, I wonder who is paying for it, and how much it's gonna cost them, what with all the click fraud going on...

Re:English may be a second language to you...

[Anonymous Coward]

Please log in next time before posting so I can killfile you. Idiot.

Bane of Advertising? Sign me up!

[Anonymous Coward]

Seriously, who *wants* to see advertisements for other people's products and services? The advertising industry exists purely to annoy the shit out of as many people as possible.

As technology improves, the battle between advertising generation/content/delivery and ad-deleting infosystems is going to heat up, and ads will become more and more like the audiovisual equivalent of spam to get past our filters.

In a world where searching for a company or product is as easy as punching up Google or flipping through a paper Yellow Pages, push-advertising is nothing more than dog crap on the boot of our lives.

Why not make ads fun, interesting, amusing, interactive? And by that, I don't mean punching monkeys. I mean TV channels of ads, website ads that require an actual click to start playing. TV shows featuring the product (who remembers 'Viper', or most of Saturday morning cartoons from the 80s/90s?). Humorous video clips about it.

Interesting and intriguing Flash games. Non-obtrusive product placement in entertainment. Non-obtrusive product placement in the physical world (see 'guerilla/gonzo marketing'). Free T-shirts, baseball caps, mouse pads etc with the logos or ads on. What would you pay for your ad to sit on someone's business or home desk 24/7?

99% of advertising is selling the same old shit to businesses who request that same old shit because they have no idea of what good marketing is, and then turning around and forcing the S.O.S. on an unwilling and irritated public who will do their best to actively avoid, block, filter or denigrate said messages.

Hey, companies that make left-handed gutter demagnetisers (or ANYTHING), listen up: If I ever feel the need for one of your products, I will come looking for you. I don't mind the existence of left-handed gutter demagnetisers in general being mentioned here and there in my information flow. But screaming at me that I MUST buy the Wizzo-5000 from GutterCorp RIGHT NOW at FIFTY PERCENT OFF!!! will actively turn me right off your product, even if (and I can't stress this enough) I actually need and want a demagnetiser at this very moment.

Let me make it clear. Annoying me will not get money out of me. It may very well drive me to spend it in such a way as to contribute in a tiny way towards your financial ruin, just so those stupid annoyances will stop.

I can better that.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll give the dad a McDonalds job application.

Re: Global Standard for Click Fraud

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree. Apparently there will be a Global Standard set for Click Fraud so that Search engines conform to output logs such as ClickDefense.com's or others out there on issuing credits. The search engine's have been somewhat receptive to working with marketers provided you can provide them with accurate data.