Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
Free Conference Call -- No Spam, High Quality
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.
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.
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.
You must be new here.
True confidence comes not from realising you are as good as your peers, but that your peers are as bad as you are.
Can good content beat Google's pagerank algorithm?
If the content is good, people will link to that page, thus boosting the Pagerank. That's the whole point...
check out this track record for 180 solutions. These guys have been corrupting your mom's computer since day one.