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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'."
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.
"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?
They can see IP addresses for clicks in their server referrer urls and thus they know that many are frauds (see slashdot et al passim for more info on fraudulent clicks).
Their complaint is effectively that google doesn't provide them with this info and so they have been asked to pay for X clicks when they would like to pay for Y distinct clicks.
They really have no case. Imagine a guy being paid to hand out leaflets in the street... suppose some other guy keeps walking back and forth taking a leaflet - is that the fault of the leaflet guy?
Justin.
You're only jealous cos the little penguins are talking to me.
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
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
Imagine a guy being paid to hand out leaflets in the street... suppose some other guy keeps walking back and forth taking a leaflet - is that the fault of the leaflet guy?
Yes. You'd expect him to notice after a few times that the person looked familiar, and figure out what's going on.
Back in my day, if you didn't like the service that a company provided, you'd change to their competition, not sue.
"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?
Marketing is a tool designed to increase the overall level of visibility of a given product or service. When executed correctly ,this increase sharply rises from baseline (A), then falls off its peak slightly to plataeu at a higher level (B). Ongoing investment in this marketing channel is required to sustain visibility at B. The ROI of this investment is easy to calculate: Does net revenue of said product or service (B - A) exceed the cost of this marketing channel?
Getting to C will require further analysis and either 1) a fundamental change in the product/service itself, or 2) more marcom dollars.
When you say you experienced no "matching increase in traffic" are you saying that google billed you for 10,000 click throughs to a particular interstitial page, where your internal stats for that page suggest a much smaller number, or some other fraudulent activity? Or are you merely saying that nooone who visited your interstitial bothered to explore the rest of your site?
There are a number of factors to consider in a case like this:
1. First and foremost, advertising fees are entirely market-driven. If AdWords simply didn't work, the service would either cost far less, or cease to exist entirely. That Google's AdWords revenue consistently improves quarter over quarter over quarter is testament to the notion that this system is fundamentally perceived to be a valuable service by the marketplace.
2. Your interstitial may not have contained a compelling message for its target audience. This is very likely if your AdWords investment resulted in no meaningful gain. Blaming Google in this case is simply shooting the messenger. Shoot the ad agency instead.
3. Your choice of AdWords may not have effectively captured your target audience.
Just a few thoughts to chew on anyway.
So if that company took your money but didn't fulfill their contract you just shrugged it off?
Hey, Google never offered unique clicks. If they had, you'd have a point, but...
You're only jealous cos the little penguins are talking to me.
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.
With google, you pay when someone clicks on your link rather than how often the ad appears. You name your price for how much you'll pay for each click and that governs where and how often your ad appears. Obviously the more you'll pay for your keywords, the more Google will show it and the more impressions it will make. A part of that price you pay goes to the site that hosts it. Therefore I can reward a host site simply by clicking on their ads. I suppose in a way this classifies as "click fraud" since I rarely have the intention of buying whatever is being sold.
Another bonus (or detriment depending on your POV) of pay-per-click is that you can "punish" advertisers that you don't like. A real-life example is the word "evolution". Fundamentalist religious outfits have paid for that word and consequently you see their ads all over biology and scientific sites that mention it. I click on the links since the concept of religious crazies paying scientists is deliciously ironic. This too could classify as "click fraud".
Until the day that Google installs mind probes in every human being, it seems unlikely that they can do anything about either of these common situations. As long as such "click fraud" is essentially random and indistinguishable from background noise there is nothing they could do to stop it. Nothing at all.
Yes, but what about NAT users. If my wife and I got to the same website at different times using the same ad, we are different people and different clicks. My home network has NAT setup and we each have our own computers. Small to mid sized companies often use NAT as well. Do you see the problem yet?
Also, did the company look at other information to verify they are the same hit? For example the browser in use, its version, the operating system and version, etc. There are other ways to identify unique hits. Granted someone could write a script to request a page 3 times with ie, firefox and opera but there isn't going to be a perfect system. This guy is asking google to LOOSE money on clicks that are valid from people behind NAT systems and the like.
Think about it this way. On my home network there are 7 computers. 3 run mac os x and contain 2-3 browsers each. (safari, firefox and maybe IE) Then i have 1 windows pc, 1 freebsd pc, 1 openbsd ibook, and a sparc. Further to complicate things i have linux on one of the osx boxes as well. Using the metrics i outlines above, i could hit the site with 6 different operating systems, at least 5 different browsers (counting firefox the same on each os), etc. Now that would cost the guy money. In the flip side, I could be throwing a party and letting my guests surf for some reason. Each hit would be unique in that case.
My solution for this problem is to use the metrics above and also give a discount (google's end) if the exact same request comes in. So if the useragent, os, etc come in around the same time (hour say) from the same ip, only count like 50 perecnt of the requests unique. This will make spiders and things count less, and if someone sends a link of an add around a small office with nat, it will cover that too.
MidnightBSD: The BSD for Everyone
Seems to me the /. community these days is (sadly) far more fond of comments like "If this was Microsoft, not Google, you'd be pissed!"
I say yes. If you plan to do business with a company for a long time (1+ year), you try it out for one week. If the price is double of what you expected because of a loophole in the contract, fine, let them have their overpriced one week. They lose 1 year business with me which is way more valuable.
Or by the dozens of half-wits who just HAVE to make the obligatory "I welcome our..." and "in Russia..." and "4) Profit!" jokes in each and every story.
Or, God forbid, a YADRMS (Yet Another DRM Story) in which every /. member has to explain in detail how not paying for a product isn't stealing it.
Personally, I think the "was" portion of the sentence is more accurate.
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.