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Click Fraud — An Insider Look
conq writes "BusinessWeek has a piece going inside the world of click fraud. It includes the record of a phone call the reporter had with someone calling themselves 'Kiss' who operates many pay to click and parked sites. From the article: 'Reached by telephone, Kiss says that his registration name is false and declines to reveal the real one. He says he's the 23-year-old son of computer technicians and has studied finance. He owns about 20 paid-to-read sites, he says, as well as 200 parked sites stuffed with Google and Yahoo advertisements ... He claims to take in $70,000 in ad revenue a month, but says that only 10% of that comes from PTRs. The rest, he says, reflects legitimate clicks by real Web surfers. He refrains from more PTR activity, he claims, because it's no good for advertisers, no good for Google, no good for Yahoo."
"inside the world of click fraud":
"Nothing to see here. Move along."
I guess I got defrauded into clicking on a story that wasn't there.
Oh You POS
It won't last forever, but I'd love to earn that money for doing that amount of work. Even if only for a few months. As long as he pays his taxes, and he still gets paid then great for him. Save up for when the bubble bursts while you can.
I think I'd say the same thing if I was talking to a reporter.
I seriously doubt ethics suddenly kicked in at some threshold number of sites. Instead, I would argue there is some kind of point beyond which managing so many parked domains stops getting really profitable.
Between the cheating story from a couple of days ago and this, I'd say trying to earn an honest day's pay is much harder. It is for me anyway.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
...every banner I clicked on, I might have made may be a nickel. But the PTR thing gives a new meaning to that old phrase.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
I claim to be a billionaire and made it all by clicking fraud.
That guy only claims a few hundred K.
Feh.
Earlier this year 360is.com published a brief note on clickfraud in their newsletter/bulletin thing, citing sources that Clickfraud as set to reach $1.8B by 2008. I expect we are going to see a lot more of this Fraud2.0.
Full report/page: here.
Nick.
So 10-15% of clicks are fake, and over time this number will fluctuate up or down, never reaching zero. But the important thing is that this means 85%-90% of clicks are legitimately interested people, assuming your ad is clear and accurate, which is the responsibility of the advertiser. Anyone who has ever worked with advertising should know that spending ad dollars with quantifiable results that high is a marketer's wet dream.
This is not the greatest sig in the world, this is just a tribute.
If he's really pulling in 70K a month and only 10% of his revenue is comming from PTR sites then why bother with them. He's just risking getting caught by Google and Yahoo and losing the other 90% of his revenue.
If I am working on one of my websites, and I see an ad that I am interested in, I click it. But google doesn't credit me for my own clicks. Not that it matters much, maybe a total of 5 or 10 clicks over the last year, but they have the anti-click-fraud engine turned up so high, that once I log into google or my own website from an ip address, it almost certainly nullifies my ability to click on an ad and still get paid.
Funnypics
You learn to keep it simple stupid when it comes to the business model.
"It's not that much different from someone coming up and taking money out of your wallet," says David Struck.
No it's not. It's completely different. It's more like handing out free samples, and to your horror finding that there are people who will just take any crap they get for free, even if they're not interested. It's like sending out mail order catalogues to people who just need something to put under a table leg to stabalize it. In fact, it's completely like, oh, let's say, paying a TV network based on pulled-out-of-ass Nielsen ratings, only to find out people go to the toilet during a commercial break! Who would've thought?
, MostChoice e-mailed Google to point out 316 clicks it received in June from ZapMeta.com, a little-known search site. MostChoice paid an average of $4.56 a click, or roughly $1,500 for the batch.
There's your problem right there. $4.56 per click?! What are ya, nuts?
SCO employee? Check out the bounty
Make up your mind. The article seems a little confused about the subject matter. Domain parking is slimy, but assuming you're not paying kids from India to click your ads its perfectly legit. Granted, you'll here all sorts of whining CTR boards when google improves their system (again) to weed out content-free sites that have in the past made some people a good deal of money.
:)
Click fraud is click fraud. When someone or something fraudulently clicks on advertisements to inflate the website publishers CTR and ideally stuff his pockets full of cash. This is somewhat more then slimy or immoral and is something to be legitimately upset about because it hurts advertisers *and* legitimate website publishers (who are competing in a diluted marketplace because of these automated 'clickbots').
PPC is down no matter how you look at it. Marketers, typically, jumped the gun on this new fangled advertising and spent boatloads of money 'targeting' their clientele without even having to research. Surprise. Not everyone is trustworthy. Right now google uses a blacklisting system. It is a thorny issue. If I wanted to blacklist my competitor whats to stop ME from hiring a security specialist in Croatia or Texas to start an artificial click campaign on their behalf?
Fortunately for if I considered my ad revenue...well, revenue, I'd go broke. I bleed money. But then its a good cause and my day job puts food on the table. Just keep those clickbots away from me. I can still use that nickle on the dollar!
Quack, quack.
Take a look at this graph (the stats used are genuine).
I have seen the pattern one more than one site, for what it's worth. Amazing really, as a 2:1 ratio of smart to stupid is *way* above my expectation of humanity.
Think of the Children; Sleep with your Sister
A bit ot perhaps but I'm wondering how the fellow can measure the average amount of time a user spends on a site. If I visit a site by clicking an add, his log shows 1 entry. The referer of which should be google btw so how he traces the ad display source is also a mystery. If I read his pitch and navigate away or simply close the site, that action isn't logged. He only sees the initial hit so how can the assumption be made of an average few second visit?
What does a legal 'Paid To Read' scheme consist of? Is this just a wishful thinking exersize? "Oh, nobody gets hurt and I get to make some money clicking on stuff so it's fine."
Just postulating here, but given the behaviour of some of the spyware and viruses I have seen, I am wondering if maybe this is related to the increase in fradulent clicks.
A recent virus I saw would redirect most traffic to those domain parking sites, and pseudo-search engines that (with names like, searchmastertoyou115.com) seem to be nothing more than a method for fradulent click through payments.
Has anyone else seen this sort of thing?
Post apocalyptic gaming goodness
The only reason it's an issue at all is that advertisers insist on measuring the wrong thing: the number of clicks on an ad. I suppose that's an improvement over measuring "impressions", but it's not much of one.
At the end of the day, the only thing that matters is whether or not an ad generates additional purchases of the service or product in question over and beyond what it would be without the ad.
So clickthroughs isn't what they should be measuring. Instead, they should be measuring actual purchases that occur as a result of the ad. It's kinda hard to fake a purchase.
But they're lazy. They'd rather measure the wrong thing easily than measure the right thing with difficulty.
Until they get their heads out of their asses, they'll continue to have these problems.
Use 'slashdot stuff' in the subject line in any email you send me if you want to get past the spam filter.
I have to agree with some of the comments in the linked article. Even with 10-15% click fraud, the marketing impact of Internet ads is far more measurable than the traditional media. What percentage of the time are people paying attention to the barrage of TV, radio and print ads we are exposed to every day? How do you know? Just look at the description (in the article) of the statistics that the owner of MostChoice has compiled about people clicking on his ads! Location, how long they looked at the site, whether they became a customer, etc, etc. Being able to measure your marketing has its advantages too, even if you have to deal with click fraud. (The mute button and the bathroom break have not destroyed TV ads yet.)
What this really about is companies have paid for advertising assuming near 100% valid clicks, and upon discovering that they in fact only get 85% valid clicks, feel they have paid too much. The natural result, then, is going to be a 15% drop in the cost per click, both to ad purchasers, and in payout to affiliate websites which display them. Or maybe a segmented price scheme, where sites more likely to experience useless clicks will cost less per ad. The people setting up bogus ad-filled sites will see their revenue drop proportionate with their "success" at attracting bogus clicks.
Don't get me wrong. The more effective Google and Yahoo can be at eliminating fraudlent clicks, the better. But there is going to be some point of diminishing return when deciding what is a bogus click is not worth the effort, and you will just have to lower the price or risk losing ad-business.
One of the easiest ways to set up a sites with ads that your "paid to read" gang clicks on is to establish a nest of splogs and automatically populate them with plagiarized content from real blogs. We think that companies like Google and Yahoo can benefit from better automatic splog detection (e.g., http://ebiquity.umbc.edu/tag/splog/). It might be possible to test this hypothesis by analyzing the frequency of splogs as a source of clicks for an advertiser. If anyone whould like to share their data we might be able to do such an analysis.
Hmmm Couldn't be those pop-up, pop-under and pop-in ads interrupting normal internet activity that are making consumers mad at advertisers now could it? OVER advertising is driving people away. It shows up at movies, so people rent movies or pay for on demand. Ads are added to videos and VOD. Bastards! It shows up on TV, so people record TV and skip it. Now there's talk of no-skip advertising on DVR's. Complete bastards! They're all over the radio so you have to keep switching stations or get an iPod or satellite radio. Then, of course, there's ALWAYS telemarketers regardless of how many no-call lists you're on or what service you pay the phone company to keep your name and number unlisted. Complete freaking bastards!!
Extremely suspicious that Yahoo and Google may be funding these parked websites to multiply their ad hits. "Oh, yeah, if it's not one of the parked websites we fund... I mean... uh..." OMG! The internet has some purpose besides advertising? How the hell did this happen?I just hope that whenever internet2 becomes accessible that advertising is forbidden.
paying per click is like paying per ad printed in a newspaper.
if an ad costs you $0.01 per printing and the newspaper prints 100,000 papers per day seven days a week, you pay $1000 a day ($7000 a week). Do companies pay per print for an ad? No, they have contracts that cost $X for Y number or days running (or months for monthly printed things). The pay per click method is less in money but many magnitude larger in the number of clicks (or prints).
Get contracts on a time based or customer based payment not a click payment.
If you browse the various web master forums, you'll find lots of stories of people being banned from Google Adsense for click-fraud. Just to be safe, I never click the ads on my sites. Anything that I find interesting, will get visits by me entering the URL manually.
True, I'm probably being a bit paranoid. But it's not like I have any power in my advertising relationship with Google.
Not unheard of. Some drug that was getting sued had a record of around $32 per click.
The singularity is coming. There won't be advertising after the singularity.
He refrains from more PTR activity, he claims, because it's no good for advertisers, no good for Google, no good for Yahoo.
Ahh yes, this reminds me of my days as a mercenary for hire. See, I was a moralist hitman. I flatly refused to stab people to death. If someone asked, I'd tell them, "Look, I shoot them - 2 to the body, one to the head - or the deal's off. Stabbing people to death is bad for business."
Say Kiss, if you're reading this; do the world a favor and step in front of a bus when you get a chance. Your ad sites are not content, they are pollution.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
I do know two people that have had their google accounts cancelled. One for clicking on their own ads, and one because all the visitors were in the same IP range (it was a college teacher's page for his students.) Both amazingly got google to turn them back on, but I wouldn't risk it myself.
"It's not that much different from someone coming up and taking money out of your wallet," says David Struck.
No it's not. It's completely different.
Err... you mean "yes it is"?
The only time I've *ever* clicked on a web banner intentionally, it was a flash banner, and the darn thing didn't work anyway. And that was..once. In the last ...14 years.
I just don't see who is clicking this crap in the first place.
Is it true? I don't believe it. Maybe its just a competitors attack against Yahoo and Google.
Try to imagine, what advertiser will do if they heard about this news. Of course they will think twice before they put their money for advertisement
if he can make $70000 per month without being detected, then show me. I'm also wonder.
Click fraud serves those motherfuckers right, for turning an interesting communication medium filled with real communities, into a wasteland of advertising and commercial interests. Most of the advertisers on the internet use fraud (or at least lies and exaggeration) in their own advertising. How can they call foul when someone uses fraud against them?
... and then they built the supercollider.
Just a thought.