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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'."
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.
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
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.
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
And that they are a Microsoft showcase shouldn't have to do anything with it either.
- 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 :)
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
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?
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.
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.