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.

Comments

Instant Publicity

[LightSail]

What an inexpensive way to advertise your product.

Re:Failing to prevent?

[surprise_audit]

Does Sears actually do any business in a country more sue-happy than America?? Come to think of it, *is* there a country more sue-happy than America??

Re:Terms of Service

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, this is a duplicate post. How a 0 rated post can become -1, overrated when there's nothing factually inaccurate is beyond me (it's actually not; I obviously cannot expect honest moderation on this site).

Why is this post moderated insightful?

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.

Do you realize that you've just publicly admitted that you don't understand the problem?

Let's review
Company A buys adspace from Google
Company B competes with company A (whether or not they buy ad space is irrelevant)
Company B, through its employees or agents, pays people to commit click fraud against company A, exhausting its ad budget and bringing a "premature" end to their ads

If, including click fraud expenses, company B has sales in excess of what they would have had with company A's ads running, this is rational economic behavior.

Also,
Company A buys adspace from Google
Company C hosts Google ads for a cut of the ad sales
Company C, through its employees or agents, pays people to commit click fraud against company A, exhausting its ad budget and bringing a "premature" end to their ads (also accuring a nice commission for itself)

If Company C makes revenue in excess of the click fraud expense, this is also rational economic behavior.

In either case, company A gets screwed. "Click Defense" is a putative company A, although they also sell click fraud prevention software so their claims are highly suspect.

keep it up, I can copy and paste this over and over and over...

Most of you dont get it!

[new-black-hand]

Microsoft buying Claria has nothing to do with Gator. What they are after is Gain, which is a Claria product. The reason why? Might have something to do with Gain being the most advanced targeted advertising system on earth. Think about it, Microsoft want to extend MSN and have it compete with Google. The main Google attraction at the moment is the advertising model, you get specific ads, and retailers can tailer their ads to only the users who want to see them. For Microsoft to get here, they can either try to re-produce such a system themselves, or go and buy the *best* system for targeted advertising that exists at the moment, so they go to Claria! The net result is that MSN offers extremely targeted advertising, much better than what Google can offer, which increases the value of the ads meaning less ads are required! Quiet the opposite of the scenarios being discussed here thus far. From the Gain site:

GAIN Network advertising programs can generate click-through rates 20 to 40 times higher than traditional banner ads, because through GAIN, advertisers can reach consumers across the Web, at exactly the right time in their buying cycle.

Taking into account buying cycles for ads? Unheard of anywhere else (many other features such as this that Google currently can not match). The one disadvantage that Gain does have is that it installes software (smileys, free screensavers etc.) that are used to collect the information to tailor the ads. What Microsoft will have to do instead is use their MSN services (Hotmail, MSN messenger etc.) to get this data from the users. By extending the collection of data across the whole MSN install base, the value of reaching this network for advertises is orders of magnitude larger than anything else.