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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."
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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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.
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.
...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?