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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.
Google sues people for click inflating, for the sake of their customers.
Google's customer sues Google for not doing enough.
Since Google now has pretty deep pockets, you can expect an endless stream of all kinds of wierd-ass lawsuits filed against them.
Not really. Google sued people who were artificially inflating their clicks. Now, someone is saying Google does nothing about click inflation. Who knows the specific of this individual case, but clearly Google has done *something* about click inflation.
There is no sig, there is only Zuul.
Does anyone know how does google check for "fake" clicks?
Alexan
Cytopia - Psytrance Music downloads
google does not employ any click patterns analysis, and fraud you have to both expect, plan, pay for, and fight against; mostly by yourself.
I had a one week adwords saga. The bottom line was that if fraud exists, and the claim is right they do react, but one has to act on it, not wait for the PPC carrier to discover it.
Then since this core flaw exists, great media-opportunist companies appear and sue google in order to gain media exposure. this kind of news should become no news soon enough!
cut this signatures madness. stop reading them now!
Perhaps they should read Google's TOS that prevents their liability for damages of any kind. Plus, if a company pays people to click their ads, they're the one committing the fraud and the only losers are the company itself and the IRS.
The company is a loser because they paid money for an ad that no one but their own people see. They could have saved money by not purchasing the ad to begin with. The IRS loses taxes because the company is providing service to Google, and then from Google to itself, meaning about half of the transaction taxes evaporate.
They do have to sue Google. Google is their vendor. Their alternative to suing Google would be to file a suit against an unknown - or if they suspect a specific company they could name them, but I doubt that's the case - company and subpoena Google for their advertising business's records. It's much more likely to be a longer and more expensive case that way, though.
What they want is this: Google actively monitor's for click fraud. Google sues company X for click fraud. Company Y sues Google for similar damages to what Google got from Company X.
See, they don't really want an end to click fraud. They just want a share of the click fraud profits.
If the customer is already benefitting from reduced rates to compensate for a known issue, I don't see how a court could fairly award the complaintant.
If googles customers want to pursue this, they will just force advertising rates higher, screwing no one but themselves. Especially, since google is under no onus of having to provide the same rates to all customers. They can impliment a "variable fee" for the perceived threat of potential litigation from their customers, on a per customer basis.
Irregardless of "fairness", this is justifiable.
If banks can get away with it on loans, by "examining the history and circumstances" of businesses and individuals they do business with, then so can google.
-iNToIT
I've been a vicitim of click fraud more than once. Sometimes, Google sees it and sends me a credit. (And by that I mean I did not notice it or report it -- they told me; that was early on in my advertising days, however.)
I have not had an automatic credit like that in a very long time, but my logs are indicative of click fraud. You can write to Google and get a credit, but, for some ad campaigns, it's just not worth it -- well over 90% of the clicks can be fraudulent. The time invested to keep getting credits may out weigh the value of the campaign. YMMV.
Yes, it's true. This man has no dick.
" Google is charging them for all the fake clicks they got. That's why they're complaining." No, I understand that... but how do they expect to win money over this? It isn't Google's fault.
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Now that Google is public, I believe that Click Fraud will continue to increase. Think about it for a second:
...
1. Buy Google stock.
2. Perform random searches on Google.
3. Click every ad.
4. Google makes $$$ for those clicks.
5. Stock price goes to $300, $400,
6. Profit!
It's hard to imaging any other company in which you can invest and, with so little effort, produce revenue for them. Hell, you could be doing something else at the same time! I bet while watching "Dancing with the Stars" you could flow several grand into Google's bank account. If even a small percentage of Google shareholders do the same, it's just like printing money.
Yes, it's true. This man has no dick.
What ever happened to personal responsibility? Is the legal system so distorted that responsibility isn't a factor? Plus, isn't real financial interest a requirement to bring a suit?
I could see that if Google promised click verification in their contract with the advertisers, those advertisers could sue Google, if they could show the clicks are fraudulent. But I can't sue Google, as I have no financial interest in that transaction.
Let's say I own a house, but the front door isn't metal and the lock isn't the most secure possible. Can I be sued by my neighbor because some thief breaks into my house, on the grounds that this promotes theivery and puts his house at greater risk? Meanwhile, the thief isn't at any jeopardy.
The law doesn't work that way, and lawyers who try to make it sound like it does should be put out of work.
Hey, can I sue the lawyers making this claim, because their ridiculous suit may make my online activity more expensive? Is there a lawyer in the house?
In theory, there's no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is.
Counting clicks as a means of collecting revenue is a flawed business model. It sounds and seems more "precise" somehow, but as it has been pointed out, various forms of employment has actually arisen in low-income countries where people just come in and click away for cash. It's insane and more importantly, easily exploitable.
Other advertising media use demographic polls to determine the approximate number of eyes and ears on their material. This is a fair means by which the value of advertising can be measured. It means the media will have to pay a reliable source to collect this information and all that but it's not as exploitable as hiring clickers in the 3rd world country to run up the advertising costs of a competitor.
There's still room for fraud and falsification but the target for such accusation is much easier to define and because of this, they [the poll people] are more likely to protect themselves with auditing and tracking measures should they be accused of, say, siding with Yahoo! or Google when reporting numbers. It would more or less absolve the advertiser and the medium from this problem and actually simplifies the business model considerably.
The internet advertisers should take a lesson from the rest of the world and simply go with what works. People will cheat every chance they get. It's clear and obvious. So you just have to find ways to reduce that risk.
Have you guys read the site? These guys are a bunch of ass clowns.
l
http://www.clickdefense.com/terms_of_services.htm
"RISK. YOUR ACCOUNT AND THE SERVICE IS PROVIDED TO YOU ON AN "AS IS" AND "AS AVAILABLE" BASIS. Click Defense, ON BEHALF OF ITSELF AND ITS DISTRIBUTORS, ADVERTISERS AND SUPPLIERS, DISCLAIMS ALL WARRANTIES AND CONDITIONS, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, ARISING BY LAW OR OTHERWISE, WITH RESPECT TO YOUR ACCOUNT AND THE SERVICE (INCLUDING, WITHOUT LIMITATION, ANY IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NON-INFRINGEMENT)."
First, you can't disclaim expressed warranties. Also kind of hypocritical that they disclaim all responsibility for their product and turns around and sue Googles for what amounts to a warranty issue.
Very unprofessional. Obviously a bunch of dumbasses.
EvilCON - Made Famous by
So how did you know it was really click-fraud?
multilple requests from the same IP could be fraud, or it could be a couple of people behind a NAT looking at the same page it's also possible you site had some weird-assed IE only shit that didn't render properly in mozilla or even some pathetic ASP page on a windows server kept timing out and people kept trying to reload the corrupted page. What might it be? If your adveritsing in a magazine, you'll have to assume the the advert you've paid for will only be looked at by a small percentage, and mail campain only get a 1% responce rate if it's very exceptional, spam probably gets a thousandth of that. If you advertised in a magazine, and inserted blow-in business reply cards is everytime the post office delivers one that's blank fraud or just a cost of doing business? Not every click is going to be a well-qualified, motivated potential purchaser; but some are going to bookmark you site and compare prices else where, maybe they'll come back, maybe they will not. What would happen if google sued you because a potential customer bookmarked your site after following an advert depriving them of revenue when they returned?
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
The motives of the company that is sueing them is questionable, but I think it is good in that it brings to light how common click-fraud is. Google may have had a token lawsuit or two, but their fundamental model is still flawed when it comes to preventing click fraud. Even their own CFO talks about how it is a real problem. Google can't solve the problem by suing people, and it is a real hassle to try to track down and report all the fraud to Google and hope for a credit. I think this is positive because maybe it will at least nudge Google into showing they are doing more to prevent this, but how hard will they really try if supposedly 30% of the clicks are fraudulent? If they eliminated those, they would lose 30% of their ad revenue.
First, you have to understand how Google runs your ads. You set a daily budget, and once that budget is exceeded, your ad stops. You get a new daily budget a 'midnight' (adjusted for locality, of course).
So, there are times when, right at midnight, there is a sudden and dramatic rise in the number of queries which would produce my ad, and my CTR goes to 100%. They all come from the a block of IP addresses owned by one of my competitors. Sometimes they come somewhat more scattered in the IP address space, but a few whois searches reveals that all of the offending IPs are related (through business ventures, or have the same registered mailing address, etc.)
They click the ad until my daily budget is drained, and then my ad stops for the day.
Yes, it's true. This man has no dick.