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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."
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.
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.
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?