Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
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.
500GB of disk, 5TB of transfer, $5.95/mo
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!
--
For a complete write up see Overture Click Protection Paper
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).
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.
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.
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?
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
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.
EricListen, people: JavaScript is not Java
>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.
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.
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.
Maybe more weight should be given to advertising clicks that actually result in sales.
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.
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.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!