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Google Sued Over Click Fraud
tanveer1979 writes "A seller of online marketing tools has sued Google over click fraud, accusing it of failing to protect clients from spurious clicks over web ads. The suit claims damages of $5 million and is seeking class action status. Sites get money per click from the advertisers. Rival companies of the advertiser may employ people to repeatedly click on the advertisers link on Google costing them large amount of money. Google denied the allegations. From the article: 'We believe the suit is without merit and we will defend ourselves against it vigorously.'" Interesting turnaround.
Otoh, this'll be even worse for google if Click defense manages to score a win in the courts.
Will wank off Linus Torvalds for fame.
In other news, Sears is being sued for failing to conduct background checks on the purchasers of air conditioners. It seems foreign assassins have been dropping them out of windows and killing unsuspecting Americans.
Failing to prevent? I mean, come on. This only makes sense if Google signed a contract with the advertisers saying they would implement measures to prevent this.
I have two eyes, I have two feet.
Yeah. That was what was being referred to in the Interesting turnaround link right at the end of the summary....
Google is charging them for all the fake clicks they got. That's why they're complaining.
I am trolling
RTFA
It's about people working for companies that click on banner adds of their COMPETITORS. You can do the rest of the math yourself.
Not that it matters much, the whole case is pretty much moot anyway.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
I like the idea, but it might give them more ammunition in the court case. Instead it seems Click Defense has a 877 number (same as 800 meaning they pay for the phone call). The number is: 877-872-5772. Feel free to just give them a call and ask about the lawsuit or whatever. I wonder if they'll sue the telcos for not screening real customers from the 877 number ;-)
"reality has a well-known liberal bias" - Steven Colbert
Yup: 1-877-872-5772
http://www.clickdefense.com/contact.html
...they dropped Schlock Mercenary from AdSense, they say, because of invalid clicks. Whether they're doing enough or not is, of course, open to dispute, but they do monitor clickthroughs.
Disinfect the GNU General Public Virus!
First, since this company isn't an actual customer my guess is that their suit will be thrown out for lack of standing.
However, there is a valid issue here. I would guess that Google is responsible for two things. 1 Notifying customers when they detected a non-trivial amount of fraud. 2 To make a good faith effort to combat this fraud.
Failure to perform either of these could open up Google to some amount of liability.
Actually the company sueing google isn't listed in google adds anymore it seems. So clicking on those in the link you posted will just hurt innocent companies which aren't sueing.
;-) Just give em a call and ask about the lawsuit or tell them how your day is going so far, or whatever ;-) Again the number can be found on thier website but if you don't want to visit that it is 877-872-5772
While I'm reluctant to post thier website as I don't want to give them more publicity, here is the website of the company sueing (not those listed in google ads).
As I've said below, if you want to screw with them calling thier 877 number would be better as it won't hurt other companies, won't help thier court case, and 877 numbers actually cost more than a click
"reality has a well-known liberal bias" - Steven Colbert
Most of my customers use Google Adwords and Yahoo Search Marketing. Adwords generates about 20x the click throughs, and costs more than triple that of Yahoo Search Marketing.
However, the ROI through Yahoo is consistently better. My clients are dropping Google left and right, and I strongly feel that this is due to the nature of adsense.
Ads provided by Google on affiliate websites are typically text based and appear to be designed to trick customers into clicking the ads, thinking they are part of the site they are currently on, and then the surfer just hits the back button because they never intended to leave the site they were on anyway.
My proof of this is in the stats. When someone comes to one of my customers' websites from Yahoo, their typical page views are 2-4 pages. When they come from Google, the page views are typically 1 (or just the homepage).
I don't feel that it is a click fraud issue for some of these smaller companies using adwords, rather it is Google banking on surfer error through the adsense program.
I would like to see the Google Adsense program more clearly render their ads on other websites so people know that they are actually clicking on ads. Yes, I know there is a tiny Google mark on the ads, but when is the last time you saw a surfer read everything on a web page?
Only victims make excuses