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When Ads Go Wandering
conq writes "BusinessWeek explores yet another click fraud scam, this one utilizing Yahoo!'s ads." From the article: "Somewhere along the way, an ad can wander off this trail. This happens when one of Yahoo's partners decides to give its own partners a cut in return for traffic, Edelman says. According to the study, a Yahoo partner called Ditto.com served an Overture advertisement through another site, NBCSearch (no affiliation with General Electric's NBC), unaffiliated with Yahoo. That company, in turn, passed it along to one of its own partners. (NBCSearch didn't immediately respond to requests for comment.) When that happens, Yahoo can't track its ads. Sometimes, the ads show up in undesirable places, like a pop-up from a spyware program. The average user simply sees the pop-up, unaware of how many networks it traversed beforehand."
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That is unquestionably the most incomprehensible article summary I've ever read. What?
The only sure-fire way to detect click fraud in its various forms is to take a look at the click-to-transaction ratio for a given ad. Of course, the only way to really know if there's fraud is to have some way of having a control group. What that would do is let you say something akin to "If someone clicks this particular travel ad, there's an xyz% probability that person will make a purchase, and the average purchase will be $abc."
I don't think there's any company out there doing this kind of controlled experimentation to determine true click-fraud rates, but I believe that's eventually what people will have to do.
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As dumb as the summary is, there's a simple solution to this. Only pay for legit ads.
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Very unclear summary, from a very unclear article, but I think this is what happened:
1. An Overture user takes out an advert with Yahoo!
2. Yahoo! passes the ad to its partner Ditto
3. Ditto passes the ad to its partner NBCSearch (nothing to do with the TV channel)
4. NBCSearch passed it on to one of its partners.
At that point the trail appears to run cold, but the suggestion is that the ads make their way into spyware and auto-click software.
Really. It just wandered down here for some reason.
...on Ben Edelman's site: www.benedelman.org
That makes a whole he!!uva lot more sense than the chopped up garbage summary.
This article seems to have been written around Ben Edelman's recent research about Yahoo ad fraud. Why not link to the original instead of BusinessWeek? Ben's pages don't have the popunder or other ads that BW offers, but most would consider that to be a blessing.
Didn't Google have problems with people circumventing their policies a while back? I know that Google is very strict about their ads now.
...is that companies like Google and Yahoo! have refused to take it seriously.
Many people, including myself, suggest that this is because these companies are earning big money off of those clicks, regardless of how they are obtained.
As someone who was banned from Google's "magic money machine" without reason or cause, only to find a company unwilling to talk to you about it...it changes your opinion of things. That's all I can say.
Math is math. Regular expression is regular expression. The tools are there. The future is now.
Today, Yahoo, revised our referral and cost numbers for the entire year. It turns out that we may have paid for about sixty-thousand dollars in fraudulent clicks in the past year.
I wrote the original article at issue: The Spyware - Click-Fraud Connection -- and Yahoo's Role Revisited. I tried to be as clear as possible -- complete with diagrams of what I observed.
Your four points above give an almost-complete statement of what happened, in one of my click fraud examples. Revising your points a bit to finish the story:
1. An Overture advertiser takes out an advert with Yahoo!
2. Yahoo! passes the ad to its partner Ditto
3. Ditto passes the ad to its partner NBCSearch (nothing to do with the TV channel)
4. NBCSearch passed it on to 180solutions.
This "passing on" was all in a way that told Yahoo, falsely, that a click had occurred. So the advertiser ultimately ended up paying for a click that never actually happened.
What's the big deal?
1. The advertiser got cheated. The advertiser paid for a click, but no click happened.
2. The spyware vendor got paid. Spyware comes from big companies, with real expenses. They need money to pay their bills -- their programmers, their installation partners, etc. If they couldn't find revenue sources, they'd disappear.
I don't fully understand all the money in advertising. I knew a guy who threw up a website about telcom. He wrote a few articles about new technologies (digital versus analog, j2me versus other tech, etc), and copied a few from other places. He then spammed every blogger to get links to his website. And this guy was making $1,000+ a month from Google from people selling cell phone service plans.
On the flip side, when Google is used for searches, many of these "fake" pages come up in the listings. "Fake" webpages which are nothing more than keyword spamming with links to a commercial website.
Meanwhile, people who want to add original content which is meaningful gets pushed out of the rankings because they are not SEO experts. It is like money ruined search results because there is competition, not for good quality, but for advertising money.
How does Google respond? They sandbox all new domains for 6 months to 1 year. That screws new people, and protects the old. Why did Google do that? A local astronomy group purchased a domain, and they can't get listed on Google no matter what they try. Yahoo lists them, but Google won't.
And why does Google use a pagerank for listings- the weight on how many links a new website has, and how high the pagerank of the incomming links are? It gives too much power to large older websites. It is like a star trek fan website will have a better search listing if they get a link from tv.com, than from 4 or 5 other star trek fan websites (even though the fan websites might generate more interested people).
I would like to see people rewarded for content, not how many links they generate.
Does anyone here make good money from the internet? Is spamming and SEO required? Can good content beat Google's pagerank algorithm?
I don't see any ads. I can't control TV, radio, billboards yada yada, but I damn sure can control what I see on my computer. If one happens to sneak in I let the advertiser know this little fact, I have never, nor will I ever purchase anything based on an Internet ad.
My company has both Yahoo and Google ads and the Google ads the past few days have seemed to go a little nuts. Ad groups that previously were getting a couple hundred impressions a day and maybe a couple clicks are getting 70,000 impressions a day and a couple dozen clicks before I pause the groups effected. None of these extra clicks are doing anything on my site really so I'm thinking it may be somebody's click bot gone nuts. The first morning I came in and saw 70,000 impressions I was really saying what the fuck.
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You must be quite flaccid now.
A while ago I worked at *an undisclosed marketing company* which handled advertising campaigns for many companies through the big four or five advertisers, and every now and then we'd get complains coming in from the companies or people with a keen eye that an advert had turned up in an undesirable place.
The best example of this was a partner of a parner of one of the agencies we advertise with that targeted adult websites, somebody within the company we were advertising for pointed out that their animal suppliment food (think mineral sticks for cows/horses and stuff) was being advertised on a bestiality website.
To this day we've always been wondering _exactly_ how they managed to stumble across that one!
Just my two cents.
"The average user simply sees the pop-up, unaware of how many networks it traversed beforehand."
If Yahoo gave out their own pop-up blocker, they'd help stop this from happening.
check out this track record for 180 solutions. These guys have been corrupting your mom's computer since day one.
If you want to recieve free information over a system that costs money/effort to operate, you'll mostly get what people are willing to pay/work to have you look at.
Which is the best reason for a 'micropayment' or subscription system.
personally, I'd like a system where sites to cluster into overlapping groups for a mass subscription fee to advertisment free pages, where each group is administrated, and profits shared by humans, instead of an automated system.
One small fee would cover all of OSTG, or all of Google, or all of Livejournal... I guess something like MSN's 'Passport' or AOL's 'Screen Name' would have to link a user to a payment, but as long as those systems remain exclusive, instead of overlapping, it can't happen properly.
Properly being like my ATM card, on the back it has logos for "Plus" "Star" and "Interlink" banking networks, and individual ATM's have networks like "Quest" "Paynet" and "Star"; as long as one network matches the transaction can work.
So, Ideally, a User gets an account with Verizon DSL; currently they partner with MSN I think. If instead of just MSN they also linked with AOL and Yahoo for user authentication; and a site accepted authentication from AOL, Google, and Ask.com; the link could work since at least one network matches up. I'm kinda picking companies randomly here, but basically any company you have an existing online billing relationship with could be a provider; iTunes, eBay, Amazon, your ISP, Blizzard, Steam... Not that the user would even care which specific back-end networks are used, I have never had to deal with bank card networks directly, I just deal with my bank.
As long as those partnerships are Exclusive it'll suck for everybody, no single provider would be effective in the marketplace; as a bloated monopoly they would become inefficent and expensive. But many small isolated providers would be useless at making arbitrary connections. what would be useful is several mid sized overlapping providers.
Obviously, like the bank card industry there will have to be some standards; just like Visa account numbers start with '4' and Mastercard with '5' and are all 16 digits, basic things like e-mail addresses being name@site already exist; password requirements would be nice to standardize (as an example, one of my online bank accounts only allows 4-8 characters in a password which must include numbers AND letters, while the other requires 7-15 characters which can ONLY be letters(I use the same password for both, like "Dog17" and "DogSeventeen"))
well, enough ranting; my point is the technology for a spam-free internet exists, it's just too difficult to get people to work together enough for it to happen yet.
The BW article is entirely based on Ben's work - read the source.
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isn't it entirely appropriate to have a lot of popunders and all the other. plus, what would make you search the internet (and view ads as well) if they gave you the information that was important instead of making you go, "hmmm, interesting, what else can i find about this. lemme just open a new window . . . "
I think its quite what they intended to do.
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I've noticed that all the click-throughs from LookSmart have to be from some sort of spyware company (I personally don't advertise there). I mean, who honestly has ever, ever gone to some place like "Frazoo.com" or "HadBest.net Search"? Or who besides people trying to run a site just to get PPC income has ever used "Findology.com"? I mean I just went to search there for Bill Bryson and the first result (looks identical to non-sponsored results) is for ringtones.
To me, it seems like all these search places are a pyramid of crap. I don't think any one engine is best, but I don't see the benefit to the internet as a whole to clog everything with search engines that bring nothing new to the table except a different compensation structure for advertisers. I know there's exceptions, I just wish they were more common.
Small potatoes make the steak look bigger.
Speaking as a consumer, this is not a problem for me. I don't click on ads.