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Search Companies Team Up Against Click Fraud
isabotage3 writes to tell us that the top three search companies, Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo, have teamed up to create an alliance to combat click fraud. The fact that these three bitter rivals can team up shows just how serious the industry has become about preserving the current online advertising boom that is currently underway. From the article: "Click fraud has attracted an increasing amount of attention amid class-action lawsuits and industry studies asserting advertisers have been collectively overcharged by more than $1 billion for bogus sales leads during the past four years. Google and Yahoo contend that those estimates are gross exaggerations generated by opportunistic lawyers and online advertising consultants hoping to cash in on the anxieties triggered by their calculations."
....gross exaggerations generated by opportunistic lawyers and online advertising consultants hoping to cash in on the anxieties triggered by their calculations"
I can't put my finger on it, but that sentence seems to have a lot of redundancy built into it.
Have users register before they can view ads.
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General, you are listening to a machine! Do the world a favor and don't act like one.
"I can't put my finger on it, but that sentence seems to have a lot of redundancy built into it."
Not only that, but there might possibly be some duplication in the meanings of the words. In the sentence, no less.
Where were you when the voynix came?
Can work together even though there's no love lost between them. Slashdot on the other hand has to persist with its juvenile logos.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
If you read the article, one of the things they say is how hard it is to determine the "intent" of the person clicking the ad. Are they serious shoppers, casual browsers, or even one of those teenagers who sign up for those click-for-profit type schemes. Well duh! Of course you can never know this. To me it's all quite silly. The point of online advertising is the same as the point of any other advertising medium - drive up sales (or, notoriety). And that information is readily available to the client companies. They know what their ad budget is and they know what their sales are (and polls tell them what their notioriety is). In the end they should have enough data to make their own determinations as to how valuable online ads are to them, and then they should pay accordingly. I know this is all easier said than done when the prefered pricing model seems to be click-based. But, at some point the numbers should tell the story, and if it means the online ads aren't worth what they are costing, then spend they should reallocate their ad dollars elsewhere. Eventually the pricing will align with value.
The more you regulate a company, the worse its products become.
advertisers have been collectively overcharged by more than $1 billion for bogus sales leads during the past four years.
Then maybe those advertisers should think before they agree to be advertised on those get a free ipod sites. I mean seriously who doesn't cancel those agreements as soon as you sign up for them. I wouldn't pay these people a nickle if I was an advertiser, yet they make enough to cover the cost of free ipods or free laptops even.
The best way to stop click fraud is to stop using the system.
The more I know, the less I know
The primary concern about "click-fraud" is that you're being charged for clicks that were meant to intentionally drive your costs up. In essence this means wasting money, since you can't really track who meant to click and who didn't. This adds up to tens of thousands of dollars very quickly.
The irony is that many of the companies that are uncomfortable with this medium for advertising is that they're perfectly willing to spend millions on TV and print advertising where they can't even reliably track anything. And worse, they have to hope the people that actually give a damn about their product or service are even in the market. I don't know about you, but I get my drink, go to the bathroom, and pop popcorn during commercials. With online advertising -- especially on search engines -- people only see your commercials [ads] because they were looking for something related. (I could go on a tangent here about how a clothing company will bid on keywords related to automobiles... maybe later.)
Having worked in the online advertising/marketing industry (tech sector) for over 2 years now, this problem is not easily solved. The fraudsters know all about proxies, onion routing, and a host of other tricks to drive up the costs of competitors. Then, there are those that simply think it's clever to generate traffic (on IRC we called them spammers, floodbots, etc.).
We provide our clients with click-fraud reporting using our algorithms. They're pretty accurate. But, this accuracy is based on a model, which is based on 50% hard data, and 50% conjecture. What's missing with our reporting is that Google, Yahoo!, and MSN don't give it any weight, and frankly dismiss it.
I'm hopeful that this "coming together" will help client confidence so they can move away from [nearly] untrackable advertising on TV, print, and radio. It all starts with "the big 3" -- if they're willing to assist, it's much better than a 3rd party trying to decipher 3rd party results and then have to prove it to "the big 3."
My ZooLoo
Google does measure this sort of thing, to the extent they can. I have a friend who runs a lot of Google ads on his site. He said their TOS says if anyone at his IP like clicks on the ads, they don't get paid, and if they click on the ads too often, he gets booted from the program.
All you have to do is focus on the publishers who are profiting from click fraud. If a no-name site is getting a disproportionate amount of click traffic, then you know something is wrong. And it's only the no-name sites that commit click fraud. Large, well established websites have nothing to gain by click fraud.
Google's problem is that they do not screen their publishers. Screening would actually cost money, and would also limit their click revenue. So they let any sleazebag with a website sign up for their pay-per-click programs. That's why they have so much click fraud.
"Crude and slow, clansman. Your attack was no better than that of a clumsy child."
It's impressive that these rivals have banded together to address click-fraud, but don't forget that Google has other tricks up its corporate sleeves. As seen here a little while back, they are also looking into "cost per action" ads, which would eliminate the fraud unless the action itself could be performed in a fraudulent manner. (Bruce Schneier mentioned it in a commentary about click fraud.)
proof, n. A demonstration that a conclusion is implied by certain premises and axioms.
I'm reminded of a quote: "Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted, and the trouble is I don't know which half." ~ Viscount Leverhulme, Confessions of an Advertising Man (1963)
Support Right To Repair Legislation.
The irony is that many of the companies that are uncomfortable with this medium for advertising is that they're perfectly willing to spend millions on TV and print advertising where they can't even reliably track anything.
Woah there! You had it right in the first paragraph when you said that the problem was "being charged for clicks that were meant to intentionally drive your costs up". Now all of a sudden you're on a completely different subject: the question of whether you can measure viewer response to the ad. If you sign up for a traditional TV, print, or radio ad, you can only estimate your response rate based on market research, but you know exactly what your outgoing costs are. With pay-per-click web ads, the situation is pretty much the other way around: you get good data about user activity, but your costs can only be estimated, and are subject to escalation by fraud.
But pay-per-click isn't the only revenue model out there. Pay-per-impression is considerably less prone to fraud (it can't be easily targeted if ads are randomised), and pay-per-day returns costs to the known-in-advance state. Both of these still allow tracking of user activity.
As a small-time ad-space provider, I'd far rather be hosting this kind of fraud-proof ad. That way the ad-broker can't arbitrarily accuse me of click fraud and suspend my account. It hasn't happened to me, personally, but I'm acutely aware that it could happen at any time without notice, and this precludes me from even considering it as a reliable source of income.
proof, n. A demonstration that a conclusion is implied by certain premises and axioms.
What are these ads that people are clicking on? I haven't seen one for a very long time now...
Thank you adblock and adblock filterset.g and me blocking that google script. Life is much better without that crap anyway.
^_^
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wouldn't they notice if someone got 10, 100,1,000, etc... click throughs from one or a few IP addresses?
Yes, 10,000 clicks from a single IP are easy to catch. The bad guys know that too. They also don't sent the clicks exectly one second apart either. They're not dumb.
You ever hear of malware that installs itself on your computer and waits for remote instructions? One the the things they are used for is as click bots, so that X number of automated clicks come from Y different IP addresses (one of them yours) and the X:Y ratio is low enough to not raise any flags.
Vigorously defending their irrational actions and behavior while loudly denegrating and disparaging their critics over evidence any sane, straight, clean and sober observer would immediately recognize.
Owning up to the issue honestly would be the better approach than demonstrating your desparation by denying it.
Is profit an addictve substance for corporations?
If so, maybe it sould be outlawed. Like herion is.
You mean the people who are constantly looking for ways to ruin my browsing experience with a never-ending parade of Flash ads, pop-up windows and gigantic CSS floating DIVs might be getting overcharged? Excuse me for not feeling sorry for them. Now where's that World's Smallest Violin?
After decades building small growth companies in the software industry, I'm now building another start-up in a different high-technology area. Search based advertising would be IDEAL for our market, and our start-up company size. But the threat of click-fraud keeps us out. Here's why.
Google's CEO Eric Schmidt said about click fraud is that "there is a perfect economic solution which is to let it happen.". The idea is that the price of advertising would eventually settle to an equilibirum, discounting the average rate of click fraud. E.g., if half the clicks were fraudlent, advertisers would be willing to pay half the rate, etc.
This is a good argument, but it is fatally flawed, because there is not a steady average rate of click fraud. It might be true if the only kind of click fraud was scammers trying to drive up their own ad display revenue. This type of fraud could even out to some average, which is easily accounted for by an average discount.
However, the bigger threat is targeted click fraud -- a competitor trying to drive up my costs, or a click-farmer just happening to post ad pages focusing on my market.
These targeted attacks could easily kill us overnight, by turning 10K budget into a $100K bill, or by depleting a capped budget and taking my ads 'off the air'. Either way, it is a complete waste. Worse, this waste is completely unpredictable, I might enjoy low rates and good business, or I might be shot; it is really like Russian Roulette.
This tunable targeted ad model has awsome potential for small startup companies, where the broad image/impression advertising campaigns of major brands make no sense for them. Sadly, the click-fraud seriously poisons the well. You can see it in Google's ad revenues starting to flatten last quarter .
If Google actually solves the click-fraud problem, I'll not only use AdSense, I'll also buy their stock. I expect that many others will also start using it once it can be trusted, and their revenue will grow prodigiously. Until that, I'm using other methods.