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

[flyingfsck]

www.clickmonkeys.com

Hooker With a Heart of Gold?

[mpapet]

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.

Re:Hooker With a Heart of Gold?

[DECS]

they either park a domain close to something else (slasshdot.org) or with a bunch of crap content copied and pasted from various sites, and hope the search engines think its actual content.

Then, as people arrive either on accident or through the incompetence of the search engines, people looking to buy stuff either click on ads or (more likely and more profitably) click on google search rank, and find stuff to buy.

This creates value for advertisers (because morons eventually click and buy), so money trickles down to the parked spam page maintainers.

Google + all are making money via providing a web of spam and increasingly worthless search results. The big question is: how long can Google afford to crap where it eats?

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.

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.

Re:10-15%?

[jfengel]

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.

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.

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?

Re:Click fraud hurts in other ways as well...

[hords]

If I am working on one of my websites, and I see an ad that I am interested in, I click it.

Be careful with that. Clicking on your own ads is a quick way to get your google account disabled. It's not worth the risk when some people have had trouble getting google to turn it back on again. They probably let people get away with it to a point because an accidental click can happen here and there, but it is against their TOS to click on your own ads.

The other mistake a lot of people make is telling others to click on their ads to support their site. Big no-no.

Click fraud shouldn't even be an issue...

[kcbrown]

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.

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.