An editorial on Click Fraud:
Quote:Click fraud is to Google and Yahoo what bird flu is to world health -- a problem that's manageable today, but could grow into a crisis without aggressive prevention efforts.
Silicon Valley's twin titans of the Internet era get almost all their revenues from pay-per-click advertising.
Advertisers hire Google and Yahoo to distribute the online equivalent of billboards that take people to the advertisers' sites. But advertisers pay only when someone is interested enough to click on their links.
There are several variants of pay-per-click advertising, but one form is particularly relevant to click fraud: affiliate networks...
full article:
http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/silicon...361354.htm
related topics:
Yahoo implicated in SpyWare click fraud
http://community.tuliptools.com/index.ph...267.0.html
Google Discusses Steps It Takes to Combat AdWords Click Fraud
http://community.tuliptools.com/index.ph...960.0.html
Many Smaller Sites Violating Google AdSense TOS By Encouraging Visitors to Click
http://community.tuliptools.com/index.ph...260.0.html
New report shows click fraud rose in the second quarter. The report showed significantly higher click fraud rates for high priced keywords.
Quote:Online advertisers beware. Click fraud is on the rise, according to numbers released Monday by the Click Fraud Index, an independent click fraud reporting service. Pay-per-click fraud reached 14.1 percent of all clicks tallied in the second quarter of 2006, according to the Index, which monitors and reports on data gathered from the Click Fraud Network...
One of the biggest takeaways from this latest index was that the click fraud rate for high-priced search terms -- defined as US$2 or more -- reached 20.2 percent. "For the first time, we have industry data that clearly shows what many have expected -- organizations purchasing higher-priced search terms are significantly more vulnerable to click fraud," said Tom Cuthbert, president and CEO of Click Forensics...
full article:
http://www.ecommercetimes.com/story/9wcU...Rise.xhtml
Another look at the click fraud problem:
Quote:Martin Fleischmann put his faith in online advertising. He used it to build his Atlanta company, MostChoice.com, which offers consumers rate quotes and other information on insurance and mortgages. Last year he paid Yahoo! Inc.and Google Inc. a total of $2 million in advertising fees. The 40-year-old entrepreneur believed the celebrated promise of Internet marketing: You pay only when prospective customers click on your ads.
Now, Fleischmann's faith has been shaken. Over the past three years, he has noticed a growing number of puzzling clicks coming from such places as Botswana, Mongolia, and Syria. This seemed strange, since MostChoice steers customers to insurance and mortgage brokers only in the U.S. Fleischmann, who has an economics degree from Yale University and an MBA from Wharton, has used specially designed software to discover that the MostChoice ads being clicked from distant shores had appeared not on pages of Google or Yahoo but on curious Web sites with names like insurance1472.com and insurance060.com. He smelled a swindle, and he calculates it has cost his business more than $100,000 since 2003...
full article:
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/con...ign_id=ds5
Yet another Click Fraud article
Quote:A year ago, DiamondHarmony.com, an online jewelry store, decided that it had outgrown its sole source of advertising, which was eBay.
The company added an elaborate marketing effort on search engines that included a pay-per-click advertising campaign based on keywords and phrases. For its trouble, DiamondHarmonyDiamondHarmony became ensnared in click fraud.
Instead of actual prospects, the clicks were coming from fraudulent sources. The fraud, which cost DiamondHarmony $17,000 over seven months, was uncovered through analytical software the company installed from ClickTracks of Santa Cruz, Calif...
full article:
http://news.com.com/2100-1024_3-6118902.html?part=rss&tag=6118902&subj=news