Slashdot Mirror
Google's Click-Fraud Crackdown
An anonymous reader writes "Wired reports that Google is making some effort to put a crack in the practice of click-fraud. Because of the pernicious abuse of the company's advertising business, it simply can't be sure that anyone is actually looking at the ads. Bruce Schneier talks about the problems of ensuring that people are really people, and Google's solution." From the article: "Google is testing a new advertising model to deal with click fraud: cost-per-action ads. Advertisers don't pay unless the customer performs a certain action: buys a product, fills out a survey, whatever. It's a hard model to make work — Google would become more of a partner in the final sale instead of an indifferent displayer of advertising — but it's the right security response to click fraud: Change the rules of the game so that click fraud doesn't matter."
CPA is a good model for Google and a very good model for advertisers. Advertisers, in effect, can pay for only the advertising which results in a sale.
Small publishers, however, will likely suffer. The vast majority of click-throughs on text ads result in no sale. Yet publishers still get paid for it. The only way this would balance out would be for the payment to publishers per action to go up. That would be fair. But I think the small bloggers who like to use adsense will lose revenue from this model.
Developers: We can use your help.
> Why does Google care so much? They get more money when people abuse it. Just charge less per click
> if they're that concerned about it.
Because most people *don't* cheat, which means that Google would be making less money from everyone because of a tiny amount of fraud.
I like to think, though, that I've helped cause this problem by right clicking/open in new tab on ads I have no interest in. I also fill in questionaires with random answers if I have to complete them to proceed into an otherwise "free" website, though, so I'm not sure how long this proposed solution is going to do any good...
But if people abuse it, the adversiters will find less value on Google ads.
They are trying to protect the value of their product.
factor 966971: 966971
Fraud results in distrust by advertisers. Many advertisers ignore adsense because of the high level of fraud. They don't want to pay for something that brings no sales. With enough fraud this whole business model disappears.
Developers: We can use your help.
This could open up a big can of worms, precisely because it increases Google's stake in the actual buying process. The protests over ads for controversial stuff like religious or medical items, "adult" materials, political stuff, and so on simmer to a faint background hum when Google is just churning out automatic ads, but if Google can be shown to be taking part in the actual sales and transactions of this stuff their critics are likely to pounce on that. "OMG Google is selling evil pr0n/Satanism books/weaponry/GTA San Andreas/Online Gambling/etc..."
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
Who cares whether it's actually a human? What you really care is that they purchased your product. If the payment is tied to that, it becomes irrelevent who clicked or how they clicked.
They spent money because of your ad. So you can afford to pay for the ad.
And if an AI was the one who spent the money, great. As long as their credit card works.
'Sensible' is a curse word.
It's not that simple. Google is a middle-man, they're not creating the ads. Joes Pizza shop pays Google to display their ad when certain keywords are found on a web-page. They pay different rates for different words, and they pay by the number of times their ad is displayed.
Click-fraud hurts Joes Pizza because hey's paying Google to show his ad to potential customers, but during click-fraud, no-one is actually seeing it. He's paying for nothing. Google just takes a cut of what Joe paid, and passes the rest on to the websites that actually displayed the ads (or claimed they did).
Google only cares about this because if Joe thinks he's paying for nothing (i.e. no real people are actually seeing his ads, and all the "clicks" he's charged for are actually fraud), he might stop paying Google to farm out his ads. If that happens, Google loses their revenue stream.
Lots of clicks are good for Google, they get to charge Joes Pizza more. But they're only good if Joe thinks he's getting his message out to lots of people.
It depends on the term - it's easy to rack up $125/day for the right terms (mesotheliomatic cancer, anyone?). For a lot of people, that's a good chunk of money.
All you need is an internet connection, some proxies, greed, and a "they're rich americans (because they exploit everyone else) so they deserve what they get" mentality.
How do I know this? I'm an adwords advertiser, and I tracked down one of the site owners who was doing a fair amount of fraud on one of my terms. One of the proxies he used had an X-Forwarded-For header, and I found his IP in an IRC log, and finally managed to track him down on IRC. I pretended to be a fellow fraudster, and we compared account screenshots. The guy was very proud that he was making over $4000USD/mo. His sites were simply wikis with stolen content (it's easier to make pages for a specific term that way, I guess). He did the clicks himself, and had a proxy program that simply took from a list of proxies and picked a random one every page load. He actually sat there for several hours a day clicking, and made about $40/hour to do it.
For some advertisers, it is a huge problem, especially when paying $10+ per click.
To record an ad impression? Let me get this straight. You're honestly suggesting that users submit their fingerprint to verify they've seen your ad and you expect people to submit to this? Are you high?
I mean, it's inconvenient, and invasive! Now if you can just find a way to make it really uncomfortable for the user while they're at it and you'll have achieved the prostate-exam trifecta that everybody shoots for when they want to pitch a new product idea.
Help us build a better map!
It matters because not every advertiser on AdWords is actually selling something. So, cost per action ads even if fully deployed won't solve the problem for everybody.