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."

Comments

Re:Many forms of click fraud

[lukecom]

http://www.snap.com/ is doing something different, Cost Per Acquisition. They let you set a specific action, once that action is completed you are charged. No need to worry about simple click fraud.

Re:Nice summary

[Tackhead]

> That is unquestionably the most incomprehensible article summary I've ever read. What?

Hey, it comes from a guy at BusinessWeek.

His target audience probably doesn't even know these ad-serving networks exist... a list of corporate entities is probably as comprehensible as he can make it.

> > The average user simply sees the pop-up, unaware of how many networks it traversed beforehand."

Meanwhile, the average Slashdot user simply sees a grey box, red "X", broken link icon, or grey-and-white checkerboard, unaware of which link in the chain of tracking networks, ad servers, or regular expressions in his adblocking proxy prevented it from showing up.

So if it's any consolation, I haven't a clue what the article means either, because it'd take me at least an hour to break my adblocking tech badly enough to figure it out!

The biggest problem with click fraud...

[Josh teh Jenius]

...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.

Re:The biggest problem with click fraud...

[Josh teh Jenius]

Actually, I did violate the TOS. Here's what I did...

I was new the whole AdSense thing, and working with a site using some really ugly (aka 4am) CSS code. For some reason, the ads were acting goofy, so I kept testing them myself. Naturally, I assumed a $100 billion corporation would have the common sense to ignore hits coming in from my IP, being that I was meanwhile logged in to Google in another tab.

The next day I noticed I had "earned" like $0.50. I knew this was a mistake, as noone even knew where the website yet was (as I say, it wasn't done). I emailed Google (although they do everything they can can to distract you with FAQs first. I wrote an email, explained my mistake, recieved NO RESPONSE.

Two months later, just as I was nearing the "payout" amount, I was zapped.

Now, in all fairness, I did violate the ToS. In fact, I probably triggered some automated "scam" alert. However, I must think that "clicking your own ads" is a common mistake of any developer (personally, I've clicked *everything* 10 times before my OCD mind can let go of a project).

What pisses me off is: a) dicking me around for two months after I had messed up (just boot me, and save my time!) b) snubbing me both when seeking help and offering it and c) shattering my faith in Google's "ethics". (I was a Google fanboy before 90% of you posers even knew what the page rank algorithm was).

On principle, I have often thought about just using a bot farm to generatate a zillion hits (and a healthy 0.2% CTR) and making myself a multi-millionaire, before *not* being mailed the check. Just think how much I could make selling the screenshots before they shut me down!

Mark my words: this entire thing is a scam. I have turned from fanboy to bitter, bitter cynic. I fear Google is a one-trick pony, and worse still, they stole that trick from Overature in the first place.

And, before we all go on a rant why corporations are *supposed* to be scumbags, remember: THEY made the claim to have "superior ethics" LONG before I ever challenged that claim. In other words, don't sell me a lemon, and I won't have reason to describe you as a "crooked used car salesman".

Fair enough?

Re:Many forms of click fraud

[matt4077]

Actually, that sort of analysis is pretty easy to do with Google analytics.

Yahoo click fraud -- big problem this week

[Anonymous Coward]

My company (a top 500 website) saw click fraud through Yahoo that ate up all of our profit starting last Friday. On monday, Yahoo identified the fraudulent clicks (somehow) and revised our referrals and cost to where I would expect them to be.

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.

How is money made??

[Baseball_Fan]

BUYER, BEWARE. It highlights what has become a growing worry for online advertisers: They may be overpaying for ads that show up on questionable sites and don't reach their intended audience.

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?

Re:How is money made??

[Antipas]

Click-fraud, affiliate programs, referral programs, are commonly exploited a good example of a good martking plan gone wrong is Vonage's old referral marketing program. It generated more negative results for vonage than it did positive. Google was filled with vonage-Yadi-Yadi spam webpage's that used iframes to place referral cookies. The referral affiliate spam in Google is out of control. Anyone with time to read any of the half a dozen SEO forums can generate a page rank of 6. The key the spammers use is to always have 200 domains, hosted at multiple places (different class c) to replace any that get banned... wash rinse repeat

Re:If I understand correctly...

[mcguyver]

PPC advertisers (i.e. SmartBargains)
->Yahoo Overture
-->Ditto.com
--->Nbcsearch
---->180solutions

Smartbargains buys ads from Yahoo(Overture). Smartbargains expects customers to click on their ads and pay Yahoo for each click.
Yahoo distributes their ads through Ditto because Ditto appears to be a legitimate publisher and Yahoo wants to increase their traffic.
Ditto pays Nbcsearch. toolbar?
Nbcsearch pays 180Solutions. toolbar?

In this example I'm not sure if Nbcsearch has their own toolbar or 180solutions licenses their toolbar to Nbcsearch on a per click basis. Here's a PDF on the situation: http://www.benedelman.org/presentations/nyu-2006.p df

If I understand correctly, a user with this spyware installed will see an ad. The spyware will register seeing the ad as a click. Ad networks get paid and the advertiser, footing the bill for everyone else, gets nothing.

(I've paid for ads from zango/180solutions/metrics direct before with success however I hate their business. The traffic can convert so it's appealing. I also used to work at an ad network with 180solutions as one of their major publishers. Not only was 180solutions elusive when being probed for fraud, management ignored the issue because killing spyware hurts revenues...crazy industry)

Google ads been weird.

[MikeFM]

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.