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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."
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.
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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
>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.