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

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...

[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.

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.

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!

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

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.

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.

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: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

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.

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.

[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".

Use a weighted average

[PFritz21]

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

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.