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Webhost Sues Google
TheOcho writes "Webhost company AIT has decided to file a class action lawsuit against the internet giant Google. According to the article the dispute is over click fraud. AIT claims they have lost around $500,000 due to fraudulent clicks. They claim that Google is hitting their website from 'the same IP addresses'."
Enough already.
the whole expansion plans in TFA having nothing to do with the case as such....
AIT stores
AIT launched its first storefront Thursday in Chicago.
The Fayetteville Web hosting company plans to open one or two stores each month in 2006 as part of a $5 million campaign to expand the company.
Convenient both are occuring at the same time so it can be mentioned in the same article. Looks like a news story then turns into a press release.
Isn't this their own fault if they neglect to add a rel=nofollow? Besides, the advertising agreement ought to exclude known crawler IPs like google,yahoo etc.
But suddendly, if money is involed, all this suit wearing managers start to say stuff like somebody has to do something. It seems to be true that they have been tricked. Even that it is indeed a problem of Google.
But only they can do a grep/sql statement on their little databases that stores all the cookie-ip-requests log data.
... again. The fraudulent clicks are not beeing made from a Google IP according to TFA:
Briggs said AIT is able to see where each of its advertising clicks are coming from, and in-house reports showing clicks from the same IP addresses indicate they are fraudulent.
Later on the guy seems not to see any IPs though:
"My question to them is simple," Briggs said. "Don't you think you have a right to see which IP addresses you were charged for?"
I'm sure with some serious tracking scripts any Adwords buyer should be able to monitor the IP addresses on a given keyword.
Is it just me, or does their case seem a little weak?
For more info on the AOL proxy phenomenon http://webmaster.info.aol.com/proxyinfo.html
I'm not fat, just big boned...
"My question to them is simple," Briggs said. "Don't you think you have a right to see which IP addresses you were charged for?"
Well they do have a point.
Google has this data, why not make it available?
If i were an advertiser I would want to be able to to verify that the bills Google sends me are indeed correct. Right now it seems that advertisers have no way of doing that?
But I can see why Google is reluctant, providing this data incurs more costs, and I can imagine that there will be a lot of advertisers who are going to argue with them about their bills.
Not surprisingly, the article is light on technical details. I don't believe that a corporation such as Google would seemingly overlook a simple address filter containing IP ranges used by known legitimate crawling agents.
Maybe spam agents were indexing the AIT Web sites in an effort to aggregate data like published e-mail addresses. The article just doesn't tell us much. If that were the case, however, Google wouldn't have many options. They could add end-user validation to each advertisement (i.e., "Repeat the alphanumeric string so that we know you aren't a robot!"), which would obviously inconvenience the user and ultimately decrease traffic, or they could create ban filters. I would suppose that the latter option might also garner various legal accusations.
It sounds as though AIT could have incurred a legitimate loss, but are pursuing a large corporation whose employees aren't exactly known by most people for their negligent behavior. If my suspicions are true, however, how could Google engineers manage to prevent "click fraud" while balancing the usability of their service? Nobody wants to spend thirty seconds validating themselves as a human to an advertisement. Maybe AIT would have better luck pursuing the (hypothetical) spammers.
Do you like German cars?
Gee at maybe ~100 clicks/day for ~7 years I must have driven advertising revenue for the site to the tune of at least $500,000... I mean, even before the site had ads my obsessive compulsive hourly refresh rate drove the popularity of the site to where the guys made an OK buck the first time it sold.
So consider this post my invoice in the sum of $500,000. I'll take it out in credit at Think Geek, but not in subscription dollars... or, just knock off the dupes, hell, knock of the dupes and I'll subcribe.:)
"Academicians are more likely to share each other's toothbrush than each other's nomenclature."
Cohen
How are they supposed to sift through that?
...Could it be, a small company being pissed that Google is making more than them, and they want to find someone else to blame besides Microsoft, or... is it that they are upset they were not slashdotted =P Shit happens, just like slashdot polls, Fraudlent clicks, ballots stuffers, they are equivalent when it comes to asshole advertisers, stop complaing 'AIT' and move on.
Quote from TFA:
"It's wrong, and stealing and lying are wrong," AIT President Clarence Briggs said. "Somebody needs to do something about it."
And a quick search finds this page: http://advocate.soundtrax.net/ait-suit.asp, a class action against AIT for, and I double-quote, "Stealing People's Money".
Hmm!
Here is a press release from AIT. My favorite bit?
"The real threat here is to the concept of paid search and ultimately to the entire Internet," said Briggs. "If people lose confidence in the commercial viability of the Internet it threatens the very idea of an emerging global, digital economy. Sooner or later, if something isn't done, the second Internet bubble will burst."
You say "internet bubble-burst", I hear "cheap Ducatis and Aeron chairs on craigslist".
Literalism isn't a form of humor, it's you being irritating.
...Albiet on a much, much smaller scale. A bot (seemingly) made a huge amount of click-throughs within an hour (whether this was malicious or not, I have no clue), about 100x more click-throughs than normal. When I pointed this out to Google's customer support, I was shot back an email which in effect said, "We have safe-guards in place, those clicks are real." I was pretty bummed that the "do no evil" company would fire off an email like that, without at least investigating. Luckily, when I requested that they take a closer look, and that they compare what happened within that hour with my normal traffic, they agreed to investigate. In the end, I was never charged.
Google DID the right thing for me; but I really was at the mercy of Google. I really can't see why a paying customer shouldn't be seeing exactly what he's being charged for.
Download free e-books, lectures, and tutorials at bookgoldmine.com
Okay, $500,000 is a lot of money to me, but is it all that much to Google? Given that this is meant to be a class-action lawsuit against Google, I would expect a value a bit higher than this. I figure that if there's even a whiff of AIT being correct, a simple "settle out of court for a little less" might be an option here.
Perhaps the case just doesn't seem big enough to have the class-action label stuck to it...
Ask me about repetitive DNA
If these guys have the single IP in their logs, perhaps they be looking to see who it is and sue them instead of google.
- The page has a a commercial for AIT Inc.'s "Voice, Training, and Data Services for the Office: + 20%.
- The article about AIT suing Google is immediately followed by another one promoting AIT new storefront launch in Chicago. + 35%
- Firefox says that 2 Pop-ups were blocked. I shudder to think of the content of these pop-ups: + 15 %.
-"It's wrong, and stealing and lying are wrong," AIT President Clarence Briggs said. "Somebody needs to do something about it." OMG Somebody think of the children! : + 20 %.
- The article is carried by The Fayetteville (NC) Observer. Any search on Google for AIT, Google, and lawsuit yield nothing: + 40%.
- Interestingly, though, searching for the same keywords on Yahoo does yield a few hits. : - 10 %.
Yep, this is definitely a publicity stunt by a random company trying to capitalize on Google's high profile. The numbers don't lie :)
Create robots.txt in the root directory of the site, containing:
User-agent: googlebot
Disallow: *
Any technology distinguishable from magic, is insufficiently advanced.
Well, let's see. The site is Fayetteville (NC) Online.
AIT is based in Fayetteville, NC. A quick glance at Wikipedia tells me that Fayetteville isn't a huge city, other than being the home of Fort Bragg. So...maybe the fact that a hometown company is spreading into major markets across the country (Chicago, Atlanta, Los Angeles, Nashville, Raleigh and Charlotte) is something a bit notable that local residents might want to know about? I probably would if it were my town.
audioLibre - freedom of music
I've heard of competitors attempting to harm another by deploying some method of abuse against their advertising costs. This would not be dissimilar to exploiting a 1-800 phone number by attempting to inflict cost damages against the target.
The article doesn't indicate any belief that Google is directly responsible for the abuse they believe is occuring though it doesn't indicate that it believes otherwise either. However, I did not read where the possibility that competitors or other malicious parties are directly responsible for the act.
If they believe that Google should be responsible for not preventing an act, then I think it's a case that should be judged on whether or not Google should be responsible for filtering fraudulent calls to their site as channeled through Google advertising. To make the parallel to toll-free phone service once more, I am unfamiliar with any such protection offered by a phone service provider.
Should Google do their best to determine and filter against abusive "clicking"? Yes, if they want their advertising to be valued. Are they or have they been doing their best? That is a question for the courts to decide I suppose. But in my view, unless Google is being directly charged with responsibility for performing these clicks, then I think it will be a tough case to prove.
We are fighting a War; A war on click fraud.
And we are losing that war.
--
Is it possible that those clicks were from people who use Google Web Accelerator?
Nah...Nah...It can't be. How can ppl be so dumb to sue without even confirming this? I am wrong...I must be wrong...
When Google invoices you for clicks, a share of this money is going to sites that are showing the ads. There are sites that fraudulently drive clicks in order to get more money.
When my firm used adwords, we saw our monthly fees from Google climbing steadily, from $10-20 per month to over $1000, but with no matching increase in traffic, and almost zero contacts via our web site (which was clearly aimed only at Belgian customers). We estimated that 95% of the clicks were fraudulent. We had no way of checking who was clicking on our site. So we cancelled the program and focussed on more traditional sales.
This is, IMO, one of the major skeletons lurking in Google's cupboard.
My blog
You don't know what 'troll' means, do you?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_troll
The fact that the "fp" post actually was first doesn't make it interesting..
I looked at my website's logs for that day and found over 50 instances of a request for "HEAD / HTTP/1.0" from a single IP address. What made this even more suspicious was the fact that they were all made with "Wget/1.10", and that IP never requested any other page from my site, not even the image/CSS files used on the main page.
I contacted Google's AdWord support, documenting all of the above in great detail and saying that these seem like fraudulent clicks. I got back a canned response "We're looking into it". Two weeks go by, nothing happens. I contact them again, asking for a progress update. I get back a response "Your case will be investigated within the next week". I wait 1.5 weeks, contact them again, ask what the hell is taking them so long.
I get back another response, again promising swift resolution. Couple of days later, I get an email from an Indian employee of Google saying that they have not detected any fraudulent clicks. I ask for a breakdown of charges per IP address for the day to check their data, but they say they can not provide those.
I tell them very well, I have no choice but to shut down all of my Google advertising.
Personally, I wouldn't trust Google's AdWords at all. I'm sure it makes money for some advertisers, but expecting Google to side on the side of advertisers in disputes is overoptimistic. They lose money on that, and as the case is that all the evidence is in their possession, and they refuse to show it to outsiders, how the hell are you supposed to prove that clicks are fraudulent if Google disagrees with you, as they seem to do in even obvious cases?
1 time I had an experience of poping 2 Google ads per click. I don't know if it was accidental, and it doesn't seem to explain the phenomenon.
Briggs said AIT is able to see where each of its advertising clicks are coming from, and in-house reports showing clicks from the same IP addresses indicate they are fraudulent.
So either, some meanie out there was clicking the link over and over, in which that person is responsible. Or else, perhaps the IP is one of Google's, as somehow Google sends the person who clicked over to the website?
"I will pay Google 1 cent for every click on my ad. Regardless the number of clicks."
If it were me, I would always have a maximum in place, and a method of verifying the correctness of a bill.
Besides, do Internet ads really work?
Point taken ;)
Any technology distinguishable from magic, is insufficiently advanced.
AIT is already pretty sleazy. Although not directly related to this adwords issue, on their 50 dollar a month dedicated server hosting, they give you 1000 gigs of transfer per month. In the fine print is a 40 cent per megabyte of overage cost. This is 10 times what all of the other discount hosting providers charge like servermatrix or serverbeach. Going over by a few hundred gigs which they original only charged 50 bucks for, nets tens of thousands of dollars in overages according to their scale.
Sorry,
I misconfigured my squid again...
Sorry.
http://legalteam.google.com/
Well, the fallout from this was pretty severe. First, no one at google would speak to us. It was a black-hole. As soon as they determine you're defrauding them, you have no mechanism for appeal. After exhausting that path, we tried to sign up with other advertisers but discovered that there is a "black list" shared among the various web-advertisers and Google had placed us on it so none of the other advertising 'agencies' would speak to us.
At this point, we're still begging our users for money to pay for the bandwidth. There's about 6 years worth of email archives, plus scans of out-of-print manuals, hundreds of links to tech sites, and lots of invaluable information that our users value, but it's always the same 50 people who contribute monetarily... We occasionally try to sign up with ad companies but they still won't talk to us.
Seems to me that advertising more often than not takes unknowns into consideration. What it really comes down to is whether or not the advertising expense has a profitable return.
....etc..
.... then they can set a fee schedual...
You place a bad ad and get no return than who's fault is it? Your for either creating a poor ad and/or placing it in teh wrong location... etc..
But does that advertising/account department of say some newspaper give the advertiser the list of subscribers to the newspaper?
equating internet advertising with phone bills is perhaps not the way to figure it. You advertise on TV during the superbowl you pay a set price, price dependant on which channel you are advertising on.
There are different advertising deals from signs you stick out on teh side of teh road to flyers to
and all these deals may have different specifics as to cost.
pay per click? Perhaps when the internet gets better mapped into traffic population
Bottom line, if they don't like the agreement they made with google....
Fraudulent clicks....isn't that the same as MS IE defaulting to using refresh from site, even when its in the cache... so to make their browser appear to be more popular to those who see such information?
fraudulent clicks...... all things considered..... it simply should be figured into the price paid on teh per click trip.
Remove teh fradulent clicks and would the price to pay per click, would it go up?
Its a quality issue, and it does go up in teh rest of teh advertising industry.
Its all about getting a percentage of the clients return on advertising investment thru you.
There is no case here. and it appears that the "sue you" system has entered the advertising industry.....
How much does the court system cost for ad story generation?
Hint: how much did SCO pay for all the stories about its lawsuit against, in essence, FOSS (with an entity figurehead - IBM)???? or did the story writers do it out of teh goodness of their heart? (hint: nobody in a dog eat dog business of teh media knows what heart is, but only to sell more media).
maybe informative would be the best description for an accurate first post... :P
As yesterday showed, Google is used by more intelligent and wealthier users. i.e. ppl who are likely to buy. Or do prefer to not sell?
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
It's ATI's evil twin!
I used AIT for a while a couple of years ago.
THEY.ARE.SCUM.
They billing practices are blatantly fraudulent, sometimes charging you ridiculous "bandwidth charges" that exceed hundreds of dollars a month. Calls to billing never get answered, and neither is there an obvious way for one to close his/her account.
It took me over three months to have my account closed. My total on-hold time over those three months was over 8 hours. I left atleast 20 messages, out of which three got answered. I would call and leave messages, and eventually after a couple of days someone would call me back and give me a bunch of instructions on how to close my account (visit some obscure page, print document, sign, fax etc.), and then... nothing. I'd call back and after trying for days to get through to someone, they'd say they never received it, and I'd have to do it all over again.
Sometimes they would say they received it, and the account would be closed; and the next month, my credit-card would be billed again.
They have promised me to repay my money back, and I've seen nothing in over three years.
Not to my surprise, other people have been through similar situations with this provider, and some of their stories are pretty terrible. Read all about it here:
http://autsucks.com/
They even have ex-employees there talking about how bad they were treated.
http://www.aitsucks.com/ - I say no more..
Cheap UK and US VPS
Talk about misguided.I once had an interview at AIT. What a horrible experience. Security everywhere, guards/military, keyed elevators. During the interview they played good cop bad cop. The sad fact was the interviewers were both lead Admins and both were let's say not very impressive. I felt like I needed to wash my hands when I left to get the slime off.
Not long ago, we hired a former employee of AIT. AIT was trying to make him turn in his HOME computer to them so they could search for "confidential info". They kept sending threatening letters. Apparently they have people paid off in Fayettville so they get away with a lot of abuses. I know they don't pay squat and they don't have to. There are basically no other tech jobs in Fayaettville. It's a poor town.
AIT is very very bad. I colocated in their datacenter for about a year, paying $100/month for a verbal agreement of 100 GB bandwidth. There was absolutely no paper record of the 100 GB limit and not verbal record of what charges would apply if I went over. My paper contract with them had explicity voided out the section regarding charges for excessive bandwidth.
s .html
One month I received a bill for $6000 citing "excessive" bandwidth. I had used approximately 200 GB of bandwidth, about double my allotted. I called and they assured me it would be fixed. Then the next months bill was $10,000. Their billing system continued to try to draft my credit card.
I finally had to take them to court over the disputed charges. They "waived" the $16,000 right before we entered the courtroom. The eventual settlement came to around $600. These guys are crooks.
http://www.webhostingratings.com/plans/AIT-Review
"AIT is flat out terrible and possibly the worst service out there."
"I have horror stories about AIT on which I could dwell for hours, but let's just say that AIT's attitude no matter what happens is "punish the customer." They feel free to mess with your stuff whenever they feel like it, change your deal on a whim, and generally suck! Big-time weasels! We are planning a big crew party for after we blow them up; we'll call it "Operation AIT Freedom!"
"When I moved, AIT continued to bill me for "service" on an account that was closed. When I wouldn't pay, they ruined my credit. I could not even talk to credit manager about it. Bad guys!"
""Based on BBB files, this company has an unsatisfactory record with the Bureau due to one or more unanswered complaints.""
"They've stolen $900 from me by disk over-usage and fraudulent billing practices."
"AIT systematically stole money from us for months."
These are all from different customers. This company has consistently and systematically screwed their customers.
I live in Fayetteville and have dealt with AIT for hosting stuff ever since they came into existence. The business was started by a ex-soldier (Clarence Briggs) and is now one of the world's largest web hosts as far as number of domains hosted. They are not just some "random" company as other people have said.
/. article) as of last week over advertising fraud. They claim that the newspaper is advertising a lot higher # of unique visitors to their wesbite than what they actually receive (they are hosted with AIT). It's interesting in that to me it seems AIT is revealing private information about a website they are hosting (not for much longer I bet!).
However, the point that the article linked is in our local newspapers online site is valid. Also, probably the reason that it talks about AIT's plans for expansion into storefronts is because Fayetteville has a vested interest in what is going on with AIT as they provide good high-tech, high-paying jobs for our area. People reading the newspaper (which the online article is a clone of what was in our newspaper), want to know what is going on with that company (which is smack in the middle of our attempt to revitalize our downtown area).
Another interesting tidbit is that AIT is also suing the newspaper (that was linked in the
So, basically, you all are getting a look into my town's petty politicking by one of the largest companies that is based out of here. Enjoy.
"To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield." - Tennyson
AdWords is apparently a fairly messy jumble of c++ code, and there are some problems with it.
the main thing i have heard is from the OTHER perspective, people with adwords on their site getting cut off for "fraudulent" clicks, losing as much as 1,2,3k because too many clicks were made from the same ip address.
so bottom line is, if you want to cut off a website's adwords revenue, just make a quick bot to cut them off!
Google Web Accelerator is a proxy, so one would only expect a number of same IP's from AdWords, since the same people that would use Google Web Accelerator are the same people that would click on an AdWords link, especially for an ISP.
If our hypothetical leaflet guy had one of the largest automated server farms and most advanced IP tracking technologies on earth at his fingertips, and he wasn't handing out leaflets but, lets say, charging for ad clicks, yes, he by god better know that he's giving out the same leaflet to the same people over and over. Even if it's not exactly specified in the contract (and it probably is, I couldn't be bothered to look it up now), google has a duty of care to ensure that their customers get value for money and are not defrauded of their money using google as a middleman.
Don't bother passing the crack pipe, thanks.
What he can't kill, he has sex on. Trent.
...that only you users of Google advertising can answer.
Whenever I do a search to buy something, the regular search results always seem more on target than the advertising. And whenever one of the paid adverts is spot-on, the link to their store or even a deep link to the merchandise is right near the top of the first page.
So, I'm wondering, why advertise at all? Google search works better, and it doesn't cost the advertiser anything. Seems to me Google search is so good, it makes advertising on Google nearly pointless.
So, from the perspective of an actual user, how far off base is this thinking?
Maybe the view's a little paranoid, but with business a little paranoia is a good thing. Several times I've seen it suggested that a competitor might hire some cheap labor to click on their competition's ads, to cause them to get charged more for their advertisement. I wonder has this company even explored this option? It doesn't sound like they have made any connection between Google and the clicks, and are just aiming for what to them appears to be the most obvious source, without any evidence whatsoever. Most obvious != guilty. There is no way they can get "reasonable doubt" out of this.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
Good high paying jobs? I worked there as an admin. On adverage the average admin salery was 28k
/. as good press, I am glad to see the customers coming to speak out tho.
The average tech pay was around 22k
They raise their "average" pay per employee by giving raises to the officers
As for number of domains hosted, they do not meet the number listed, just like in the early days they did not have an actual "OC-192", they just had the equivilant over multiple pipes.
You have to watch out for posts like this, at AITsucks.com the press boys at AIT like to come and anonymously say crap like this.
AIT has in the past decided to lock their current month to month customers in a 6 month reacurring contract, wanna know how they let them know? they barried it in a Christmas new letter, then wondered why after the first 6 months so many customers wanted to cancel and blamed it on everything but that. Something of that coincidence on that magnitude just does not happen.
Also as stated Fayetteville does have a vested interest in AIT, but what this poster failes to mention is all the times fayetteville has threatened to take the building away from AIT that they basicly gave them for failing to meet the conditions in which it was given.
AIT sees
When you cant win, ad hominem.
AIT suing Google for fraud is like the pot calling the kettle black. For a few years now, there's been a website run by a former AIT reseller that delves into the dark truth behind this McWebhost. AIT CEO Briggs is revealed to be a boastful drunkard who abuses his support staff, and AIT's infrastructure is revealed to be mostly obsolete, poor translations of better open source and proprietary packages. The full story can be found at AITSucks.com, I recommend budgeting quite a bit of time, get a cup of coffee, and prepare to be shocked and amused by the pervasive skullduggery of AIT.
It seems probably that they'd see some dupe IPs from people surfing using Tor, and cookies might reveal the internal IPS used behind NAT roters.
"But I can see why Google is reluctant, providing this data incurs more costs, and I can imagine that there will be a lot of advertisers who are going to argue with them about their bills."
Hey, sometimes "Do no evil" costs money. Now, we'll see if Google puts its money where it's mouth is.
-- "I never gave these stories much credence." - HAL 9000
I don't work for AIT, I work for a large local jewelry store. And yes, AIT support is horrible. One thing that impressed me though is that when I e-mailed the President of the company, he responded within one hour and sent someone out (since we are local) to resolve our issue. However, we have a long history of not having our phone calls returned from support or ever reaching a real person - so I can feel the pain. I've tried to convince my boss to switch web hosts, but he is too lazy.
If I worked for AIT would I say all that? As far as the building stuff, yes they haven't been fulfilling their obligation under the terms of the tax break they got etc. Don't assume just because one person has a different opinion on something that they are a press puppet for the company. I just happen to have had *some* good experiences dealing with them (not many).
"To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield." - Tennyson
well then I apologize if you dont work there but the corrections I gave are still true. Tax break? how about they are getting that huge building for a few hundred a month and a buy out of less then 10% of its value.
When you cant win, ad hominem.
Well considering AIT's bad reputation with web savvy people all over the country, I could see angry customers purposely clicking the pay-per-click link over the free link every time they search for "web hosting".
Also how do they treat their own employees? Their consistent 'evil doing' is coming back to kick themselves in the asses. They will not win this case. They likely just ruined what little chance they had of gaining new customers, unaware of their greedy unethicalness.
Am no fek Buddhist, but this is enlightenment.
I am using Google Ads (search engine only) and I love it. It's bringing in more work than I can handle so I can choose my work. But it might be due to the fact that it is the Dutch market and it is for therapy and stuff. Check it at http://www.tiouw.com/ ,but dont click on any advertisements please, lol, if you run into one of my.
The problem with this idea is often the click reciever will lie about what gets ordered. This is especailly the case with non-trustworthy businesses. Credit card applications are by far the most prevalent example I can think of now. You are solicited to apply, but whatever they promised to you you will only get if you are accepted. The big problem here is not that the referring site didn't do their job, the problem is the recieving site didn't have a good enough deal.
I'm sure pricewatch.com does not charge their advertisers on a per sale basis because there's just too many sites that lie about price, shipping, item condition, stock, etc.
Please note I don't really have any better ideas, but pay per click seems to be the best available now.
"And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the World"
1 John 4:14
took me 3 months to cancel xbox live, :)
they kept refunding my money but every month a new charge
AOL proxy.
Idiot.
Justin.
You're only jealous cos the little penguins are talking to me.
I had to RTFA to find out that AIT claims it lost "$500K in revenues" -- which pretty much means it is assuming some comparison between its alleged fake clicks to either a % conversion rate of real clicks or assuming that all of the clicks would have resulted in sales.
Its not much of a basis for a lawsuit. The damages should be based on costs incurred to deal with fake clicks, because legitimate sales/clicks weren't blocked.
heres a reason you shouldnt advertise with google :)
GOOGLE BADSENSE
in case that site goes down heres a scrennshot screenshot
its really funny (or not funny if you are a google adwords advertiser)
My question is this.
How can they claim a lose of revenue?
Fraudulant clicks would result in a increase in costs (not a lose of revenue).
Secondly, they must of been making a profit from there adwords campaign. Why else would they keep doing it from so long?
Google has systems to catch fraud clickers. But if someone was clicking a link twice a day for 3 years then I hardly think Google could be responsible for that.
[2] Press <Ctrl> + to increase the font size (or, scroll down thumbwheel while holding down <Ctrl>)
[3] Kaboom! GPF
This site also delivers a sleazy pop-under.
Slashdot entertains. Windows pays the mortgage.
This past month i paid google 30 bucks for my adwords account. Typically i get 5 clients per month when i run their advertisement. This month, things took a nose dive.. So i descided to hold up shop untill i had some time to investigate why things flipped so fast.
I actually forgot about the ads figuring people were not clicking due to the lack of sales, I was rather susprised when i got the bill for 25 bucks.
Anyway.. Thats why i stopped my account and figured I'd just put my money and time elsewhere.
Thats the power of money, I doubt you can sue, advertisement is a risk. that risk with google appears to be getting much less trusted.. I'd rather trust a local newspaper with my advertisement than google right now. And thats most likely what i'll do for my advertisement..
that and post my url on slashdot and any other site that asks for my homepage... (Still unsure if thats 'good' advertisement or not).
"It's wrong, and stealing and lying are wrong," AIT President Clarence Briggs said. "Somebody needs to do something about it."
Has he borrowed one of GWB's speachwriter as a publicist?
meh
Their ad at the bottom said it was going to time out after an hour. I left the page up for over two and it is still there.
Should I go for it? I will win a prize.
qz
Since when is an IP address considered sensitive personal information? It's ridiculous when you consider that the user clicks on the AdWords link, which Google records along with the IP address. The user is then redirected to the destination website which can then record the IP address as well. The destination website can even determine that the request from IP 12.34.56.78 actually came from an AdWords click. Google's just not sharing which clicks it billed for correspond to which IP addresses (which both parties have a record of anyways).
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
IP addresses, like phone calls, should be listed so companies can tell if they are paying for a legitimate click, Briggs said.
Someone may want to explain to Mr. Briggs that entire countries of people can be housed behind one single IP address. It's a basic function of NAT - and you sir, agreed to advertising with Google. If you didn't read the F(ine) print... your lawyer won't have a slimy appendage to prop him/herself up on in court.
Thanks for playing "Advertising on the Internet" Mr. Briggs - here's your parting gift... $200,000 in lawyer and court costs. Oh and there's a black van with ten thugs in it waiting for you - compliments of our sponsor... Google.
The IP addresses of many of the suspected click-fraudsters begin with 172, right?
Careful with that. wget is only a "robot" when you are downloading recursively; otherwise, it's a simple, dumb client which can be incorporated into other user-agents.
Batou: Hey, Major... You ever hear of "human rights"? Major: I understand the concept, but I've never seen it in action
That news article gets Slashdotted, why not click THAT ad over there that publicizes AIT (or whatever it is called) to drive them nuts? ... AGAIN!!
I am sure you would do that...
Maybe with IPV-6 - but with IPV-4 there are only 65K ports that can be used for NAT and some of these are already in use.
Practically you might be able to get away with maybe 50,000 ppl. But that would be pushing it.
Ppl would not believe the nightmare from Telus. We had 1000's overbilled and refunded. Problem was they still were at the trough and the only way to get them out was to refuse to pay the VISA bill.
Telus is one company I shall NEVER deal with again in any form. And I won't deal with any company their executives go to either. Its really too bad the innocent shareholders end up being bag holders. THere is no justice in this world.
Clarence has always been big on "vanity" law suits, just ask the locals in Fayetteville, NC. He, AIT, has lost more than a few but this looks to be the biggest yet. As for anyone else who might be entering in as the part of a class action suit, I'd get a new lead plaintif.
Kevin M. Childers
Computer repair and networking tech.
Available over most messaging services as KC1111111111
This is a contract dispute at best. Move along, nothing to see here.
Poof.
Any ideas for how Google could stymie third world Clickshops if it wanted to? My best idea so far is for it to generate some obfuscated javascript which decodes a one-use-only url for clicking. That takes care of most robots around today. Next, have that script set some cookie so an individual browser is limited to charging a max of about 3-5 click-throughs per site. Or use some other scriptborne method to uniquely identify browsers. Who the frick browses without javascript anymore? 0.000000000000000001% of the browsing public? Are they legitimately clicking on ads?
Thanks, now instead of just a single first post, there was a first post and a thread about how awefull the first post was.
I have read penis emails that made more sense.