topsites - 11:45 pm on Dec 30, 2005 (gmt 0)

As the owner of a small directory, I am well versed in the areas of fraud, not only coming from the engines but also like has been mentioned, in the affiliate department whether from the sponsor or the affiliate, it doesn't matter who is lying, but someone is almost always cheating.

The reason I know this is because most sites hardly get 10 thousand data requests / week, but look at statistics anywhere and suddenly they speak an entirely different language which requires wearing tall hipboots... Next come sponsor claims which require even taller hipboots, and last but not least come ALL the folks claiming they earn ten times the money on the Internet than they ever did in the real world, and with hardly an hour's work per day. So perhaps it's not entirely the engines who are at fault.

Lets take another look, I know ppc's tolerate (and incentivise) clicks to some extent.
This is nothing new, if you own a ppc engine, you hardly have a choice in the matter.

Put yourself in their shoes:
You own a search engine. It is a ppc engine, and you get a TON of people sign up and bid on terms, now what?
First you need to satisfy the demands of customers HUNGRY for traffic, so hungry that some would like the ability of you being able to deliver upwards of 500 clicks / hour, and below 4 cents / click would be nice.
In addition, most of your advertisers are folks who can not advertise anywhere else on the Internet, most of them come from the viagra / casino / get-rich-now line of products, or something along those same lines.

So your job isn't to provide traffic to Walmart.com, if your job were that easy, then everybody would have a ppc engine. Instead, your job is to drive visitors to certain online genitalia enlargement sites you can't even be sure exists as a store in the real world... And if you're not sure, I guarantee neither is the visitor.

What would you do?
How would you provide tens of thousands of daily clicks to sites and products that, as a rule, have a very low interest tolerance to begin with, and a very high competition margin next. If anything, I place the blame square on humanity as a whole, look on the Internet and every place you look, it would APPEAR as IF scamming was the only thing anyone does on the Internet! Slews of garbage sites selling us every pos under the sky, it makes me as sick as it does you, but to the newcomer that is all they see! Perhaps a general cleaning up of the entire affair would pretty up the picture, but somehow I don't see this happening in my lifetime.

At the same rate, it promotes natural selection, for those of us familiar with the term, there suddenly comes a fair amount of acceptance and tolerance with this.

Not to say I take sides with fraud (I don't), but I have a pay-get-listed NO-questions-asked thing myself, sometimes it's the only way to earn a profit. The traffic suffers hard from this but paying webmasters are not easily put off. Money talks, and that's the end of the story, they want traffic NOW, can you deliver?

For those who want quality, I suppose Overture / Adwords is the route to go, lets not forget the cost / click in all of this.

[edited by: topsites at 12:04 am (utc) on Dec. 31, 2005]