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."

Comments

Oh oh, slashdot is a part of it

[From A Far Away Land]

"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.

Re:Oh oh, slashdot is a part of it

[From A Far Away Land]

""Nothing to see hear move along""

You're right, that would only be funny in a story making fun of deaf or blind people. Certainly not in a story about people who click with no intention of using the page they are loading.

If I had a penny for

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

...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.

he claims he claims

[Anonymous Coward]

I claim to be a billionaire and made it all by clicking fraud.

That guy only claims a few hundred K.

Feh.