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Adbusters Suggests Click Fraud As Protest
An anonymous reader writes "In response to Google's recently announced plans to expand the tracking of users, the international anti-advertising magazine Adbusters proposes that we collectively embark on a civil disobedience campaign of intentional, automated 'click fraud' in order to undermine Google's advertising program in order to force Google to adopt a pro-privacy corporate policy. They have released a GreaseMonkey script that automatically clicks on all AdSense ads."
If I was an AdWords user, I would pull all of my bids now and let other advertisers exhausted theirs first.
Then a "word" will be easier and cheaper to get.
Virtual Betting on Facebook for non-geeks.
I've always found it interesting that Adbusters does actually contain advertisements. Not many, but they do have ads for, like, shoes made from recycled tires or something... It is an interesting magazine, if you can find it, though.
ZuluPad, the wiki notepad on crack
I you want to learn a lot about civil disobedience, web search "civil disobedience carl cohen howard zinn" - and I note that for once I didn't say to google it.
I studied under Carl Cohen - and highly recommend reading everything by him and Zinn if you want clear thinking on this topic.
The act of overloading Google with this plan is something that I personally find quite laudable - but it is not civil disobedience. As an ancient hippie, I don't mind saying that this act is simply called, Sticking It To The Man . I'm saddened that today's Man-Stickers are so inundated with political correctness that they can't call an action for what it is.
As Carl might have said - they emasculate their argument by so doing.
FWIW, it's not the summary - the stupidity of calling it civil disobedience comes right from TFA.
Pathological kinda promises Path + Logical - but instead, you get stuck with pathetic.
The smart thing for Google to do would be to completely ignore the program, and let advertisers use their usual click-fraud dispute resolution mechanism. By fighting the program, Google would only be giving the program legitimacy. Without the "I'm being oppressed" notoriety, the program will pick up very few users and the total effect on the market will be small.
I'm not against advertising. I'm against fraudulent, manipulative, and obstructive advertising. Google AdWords typically score relatively low on all three counts, so they're fine with me.
Automated (or random) clicking will only hurt the sites that you visit, by lowering the value of the entire site's ads.
-- these are only opinions and they might not be mine.
I don't understand this "protest." Google, apparently the target of the protest, gets increased ad revenues, whereas small businesses like mine that use Adsense get... Thousands of dollars in additional advertising costs that are designed to generate no revenue...?
I admit it -- my small jewelry store (beadstore.com) is not a particularly sophisticated Google customer. I think in 2007, we spent maybe $10,000 over the course of a year advertising on Google. (Since then, we've scaled back considerably -- even though it increased business, cash flow concerns made it impossible to continue.)
After we started, I handed off control of the budget to someone who didn't quite understand the limits system properly (they're beaders, after all, not techies). She racked up almost a thousand dollars in costs in a single week. Eek! A potentially devestating mistake, since $1,000 in unexpected expenses is a huge amount for a little company like ours. (We learned our lesson and made sure everyone understood the system pronto.)
Fortunately -- and I'm sure not coincidently -- that week was also one of our biggest grossing weeks ever (though it probably didn't cover the additional advertising costs, at least over the short run). I don't know what we would have done had those costs been driven by non-customers clicking through in some misguided attempt to hurt Google. I'm not looking for sympathy for people who screw up, or suggesting that all Google advertisers are like us, but please remember that a single click can still cost a dollar or more, so a few fraudulent clicks really hurts. Not only does it inflate your advertising costs, but it also denies us of legitimate potential customers (since the system is designed to remove the ads once your target budget is reached). And I suspect we would never know for sure whether we just had a really low click-to-purchase ratio for a given week, or whether we were the victims of an organized fraud (in the non-legal sense, anyway).
Lastly, Google claims that multiple clicks from the same IP address are filtered out -- of course, I have no idea if their system would prevent what these people are suggesting.
I'm a cautious supporter of Adbusters, but I actually took google's ads out of my hosts file's filter list.
My reasoning is that I believe, after years of studying media and communications, that advertising can only be ethical if it resembles the directory that you find in a phone book, accompanied by an honest, vetted description. Otherwise, it is rhetorically manipulative and preys on the uninformed.
Now, while google's ads aren't perfect, they hew closer to this ideal than most other forms of advertising. The lack of emotionally manipulative visual imagery helps (I make a living messing with such imagery, BTW).
I don't trust Google, the company. I am opposed to their excessive privacy abuse. However, I balance that against their general model, and find the competition worse.
I won't support adbusters in this campaign, but I don't oppose it either.
Damn those pesky terrorists
as i am reading the comments, trying to think up something snarky...this pops into the old inbox:
Hi, We're writing to let you know about the upcoming launch of interest-based advertising, which will require you to review and make any necessary changes to your site's privacy policies. You'll also see some new options on your Account Settings page. Interest-based advertising will allow advertisers to show ads based on a user's previous interactions with them, such as visits to advertiser website and also to reach users based on their interests (e.g. "sports enthusiast"). To develop interest categories, we will recognize the types of web pages users visit throughout the Google content network. As an example, if they visit a number of sports pages, we will add them to the "sports enthusiast" interest category. To learn more about your associated account settings, please visit the AdSense Help Center at http://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/topic.py?topic=20310. As a result of this announcement, your privacy policy will now need to reflect the use of interest-based advertising. Please review the information at https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?answer=100557 to ensure that your site's privacy policies are up-to-date, and make any necessary changes by April 8, 2009. Because publisher sites and laws vary across countries, we're unfortunately unable to suggest specific privacy policy language. For more information about interest-based advertising, you can also visit the Inside AdSense Blog at http://adsense.blogspot.com/2009/03/driving-monetization-with-ads-that.html. We appreciate your participation and look forward to this upcoming enhancement. Sincerely, The Google AdSense Team Email preferences: You have received this mandatory email service announcement to update you about important changes to your AdSense product or account. Google Inc. 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway Mountain View, CA 94043
FEAR THE GOOGLE!
"You can kill the revolutionary, but you can't kill the revolution."-- Fred Hampton
Much as I like Adbusters, this is a headache.
Right now, Google ad URLs are relatively straightforward to recognize and decode. If Google sees this as a real threat, they may start obfuscating them and using elaborate gimmickry with Javascript, like the stuff one sees in hostile web pages. Then they'll be much tougher to deal with. The easy approaches to ad blocking will stop working.
We recognize Google ad URLs in AdRater, which is a Firefox plug-in, and we put a translucent rating icon atop each ad. Google ad links are currently rather straightforward to decode, so we don't have to follow them, just examine them. For some of Google's competitors, you can't tell where the ad link is going without clicking on it. We've considered a plug-in which follows encoded ad links in the browser, but it would look like click fraud, even though it has a legitimate purpose. So far, we've refrained from doing that. If Google tries obfuscating their ad URLs, we'll have to actually traverse them to find the advertiser site for rating purposes. That increases everyone's overhead.
Yahoo search is REALLY good now, seriously. The links are a lot more often exactly what I am looking for, and unlike the "more" tab on Google, which just tries to push more Google crap like Google Blogs, the "more" tab is actually really useful. For example, let us say I put in Bioshock. Under the more tab it would have Bioshock reviews, patches, cheats, walkthroughs, etc. For the Dark Knight it has Dark Knight movie, trailer, Christopher Nolan, Heath ledger, etc.
So if you want to stick it to Google and their spying BS, why not try Yahoo? Competition is always good, Yahoo Search is really nice now, and it certainly stomps anything MSFT has ever done in the search field(not that it is hard to top them) but it really is a nicer experience IMHO than Google search. So why not give it a go? All you have to lose is a little time.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
MOD PARENT UP. This will only hurt the sites you like and visit. It will have a meager damaging effect on Google and annoy their advertisers before the costs get cut from the ad hosts aka the sites you like.
/.ers want to help it would be appreciated I'm sure. Even if you don't like bass it is a fairly brazen attack on fair use.
But really the whole mission statement of Adbusters is stupid. Removing all ads from the internet will destroy pretty much every service on the internet. Think youtube would be profitable without ads? How about any site you visit with alot of images. Bandwidth isn't free so sites make money from either ads, donations or memberships. Most sites with memberships remove the ads for you so this goal is STUPID. Just use Adblock if you hate them so much
WARNING OFFTOPIC: A side note about Google, more specifically youtube pissing me off. I bought a bass guitar and went to find a youtube-mentor. Found an amazing player giving lessons, he had around 100 videos up totaling millions of views. The guys name is MarloweDK http://www.playbassnow.com/ . A few days ago he was inexplicably banned from youtube unable to even create another account. Some of his clips showed him playing along to music and teaching you various songs. But this goes against even youtubes stated policies. If music playing on speakers in the background being played over by a bass (much louder for students to learn) is even against the rules. Then only the audio feed should be cut according to youtube. But his whole account was banned. If any more resourceful