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Google Agrees to Pay $90mln on Click Fraud Lawsuit
Hitokiri writes "Google has agreed to pay up to $90 million to settle a class action lawsuit 'Lane's Gifts v. Google'. The settlement stems from a lawsuit filed by Lane's Gifts earlier this year in an Arkansas state court and is designed to settle all outstanding claims against Google for fraud committed using its pay-per-click ad system back to 2002Google has made a statement on their blog."
The January/2006 Wired had an article titled "How Click Fraud Could Swallow the Internet" that presented a case study of a charter-jet service victimized by this ... turns out it was their competition doing
it to use up their on-line marketing budget.
Google Girl basically stonewalled 'em.
Hey submitter and editors -- Google isn't PAYING anything. They are giving credits to buy more advertising.
Am I the only one who recognizes the difference between "getting paid $1" and "getting credit for $1 - at that company"?
Reasons why I'm concerned about Google's business:
Cue Google-fanatic flamewar.
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On the web, all you have to do is create different landing pages for each of your adverts. These are unique, and the stats speak for themselves.
Using decent server side code, it's also possible to distinguish which advertisement your actual purchasers arrived from, and this is quite prevalent amongst serious e-commerce businesses.
If your IT department isn't all that good, you can splurge big time on a very sophisticated WebTrends account, which will do all this stuff, and a lot more besides.
How many escape pods are there? "NONE,SIR!" You counted them? "TWICE, SIR!"
Since when have we been using mln to denote million?
What's wrong with calling 90 Megabucks $90M ?
Unless people are worried about conflicting with powers of two, but in any case that should be denoted: $90Mi, or 90 Mibibucks.
Or does mln denote "Millions of dollars worth of in-store advertising credit", which another poster has pointed out is what the plaintiff is receiving.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Click fraud runs about 40% when noobs manage a Google Adwords account. Much of that comes from Adsense via the Google content network, because it's a way for webmasters to line their pockets at the advertisers' expense. Competitor click fraud happens too.
The ways to control click fraud are:
1. Set low bids on the content network. Click fraudsters pick on the richest bids.
2. Exclude sites from the content network that show below average conversion rates.
3. Use your own tracking URLs to double check Google's conversion figures.
4. Don't show your ads in cheap offshore locales. Some sleezebags have set up click fraud offices in these places where people are paid to surf and click on your ads.
Discount your bids to account for the cost of click fraud. As long as you are happy with your net cost per conversion, click fraud is just a cost of doing business. Your bids are lower, Google earns less. If Google wants to earn more, they should the eliminate fraud.
http://outcampaign.org/
Title says "Pay X", description says, "Pay Up To X", will the actual article say "Pay some amount which may be X".
'But how is it fraud?'
The problem is that Google is charging advertisers for adverts which were not seen (by humans).
I can understand that the advertiser feels cheated if Google charges advertisers for 1 million clicks on their adverts, but 999,000 of them were faked by a script and only 1000 times a human end-user clicked the advert.
The problem gets worse when companies are deliberately faking clicks to create huge advertising bills for their competitors, even though their adverts are not being viewed. Similarly angry customers could do this to 'get their own back' on a company that they feel has cheated them.
Google has a problem here and they need to fix it or people won't want to risk using their service to place adverts.
I'll probably be modded down for this...
Okay that's RUBBISH. The strength of the economy is nothing to do with how much money is out there, but how much it's moving around.
Cash is an abstraction of value. It's value comes from the fact that it's mutually recognised as having a value. That's where it's value comes from, a common-agreement. You find *anything* that people are just as willing to exchange for services/resources as money. Gold's "worthless" unless you can find someone who's willing to exchange it for something you want (eg, sex). A pig's useless if you're living with vegie hippies (not that they have money anyway).
Money means not having to look long and hard for someone who's willing to trade with you. This means you have time for other things. Money is an abstract representation of time ("time is money" is true). There is no way, by the furthest stretch of imagination, that you can say time is worthless. It's the most valuable thing you've got.
The revolution will not be televised... but it will have a page on Wikipedia