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

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: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 :(

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: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.