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When Ads Go Wandering

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the better-catch-your-refridgerator dept.

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."

4 of 69 comments (clear)

  1. If I understand correctly... by thelem · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  2. The biggest problem with click fraud... by Josh+teh+Jenius · · Score: 5, Interesting

    ...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.
  3. Yahoo click fraud -- big problem this week by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting
    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.

  4. Clarifying -- from the original author by bedelman · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.