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

10-15%?

[Eric Savage]

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.

Sounds fishy

[Target Drone]

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.

Re:Sounds fishy

[MoralHazard]

Yeah, I find it interestig that the reporter seems to take these vampire's assertions about their financials at face-value. Fact is, this "Kiss" fellow is far outside the easy reach of US law (Budapest), he's young enough to be amoral and stupid (23), and he clearly engaged in a shady-but-legal business in high gear. I wouldn't trust this guy to tell me the time of day!

I also find this very interesting:

On disability since a 1996 car accident, Ballard, 36, lives with her ailing mother and her cat, Sassy. She says she works day and night running Owl-Post, a five-year-old group named after the postal system in the Harry Potter novels. Sometimes, Ballard says she takes a break at lunchtime to tend her vegetable garden or help her elderly neighbors with theirs.

OK, so she works like a dog at this job, "night and day". Interesting, but...

She claims her take amounts to only about $60 a month, noting that if she made more than $85, the government would reduce her $601 monthly disability check.

WTF??!! Why is she working like a dog, night and day, for $60 a month? She could make more money selling Herbalife shit. Clearly, this Ballard woman is lying, too--and the reporter doesn't bother to question it.

It's almost a given that both of these people are seriously under-reporting their income, cheating on taxes, etc. And you can bet that both of them are pushing WAAAY more click-fraud than they claim.

Re:Oh oh, slashdot is a part of it

[Nos.]

These "Nothing to see hear move along" jokes are getting as old as everything else. They were vaguely funny when there was a story about government coverups and such, but even those have happened so often its lots its effect.

No it's not!

[wfberg]

"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?

Click Fraud or Domain Parking?

[msimm]

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! :)

This whole thing stinks

[Avatar8]

"The click fraud and bad sites are driving people away,"

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!!

They didn't respond to requests for comment, and most of the sites disappeared in late summer, after MostChoice challenged Yahoo about them.

Extremely suspicious that Yahoo and Google may be funding these parked websites to multiply their ad hits.

Yahoo says it scans its network for PTR activity, but declines to describe its methods.

"Oh, yeah, if it's not one of the parked websites we fund... I mean... uh..."

"...it is going to scare away the further development of the Internet as an advertising medium.

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.

Moralist Scum?

[Bob9113]

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.