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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."
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.
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?
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.
I'll never make that mistake again, reading the experts' opinions. - Feynman
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.
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