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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."
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
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
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
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.
The problem is the clumpiness. If that 10-15% were evenly spread over all sites, you'd mark it down as the cost of doing business. But if the fraudulent clicks are being targeted to some businesses, somebody's being royally screwed. A greedy click-spammer might end up making 50% or 90% of a particular site's clicks fraudulent.
The upside, I guess, is that if there are a large number of fraudulent clicks, you'd probably be able to identify them as a group (say, when they come in a sudden spurt, or all from the same referrer). I'd love to see Google say, "OK, obviously you're the subject of an attack. We'll eat the cost this month and try to track down the jackass responsible, but you should probably take a month or two hiatus from advertising with us while waiting for that jackass to move on to somebody else. Sorry."
If that makes smart fraudsters try to even things out a bit, then yeah, I guess you end up just lumping it in as the cost of doing business. It kinda sticks in your craw that somebody's making something for nothing, but you pursue them the best you can and try not to dwell on it since overall you're making money.