Forum Moderators: martinibuster
"With her baby on her lap, Maya Sharma (name changed) gets down to work every evening from her eighth-floor flat at Vasant Vihar. Maya's job is to click on online advertisements. She doesn't care about the ads, but diligently keeps count — it's $0.18 to $0.25 per click.
A growing number of housewives, college graduates, and even working professionals across metropolitan cities are rushing to click paid Internet ads to make $100 to $200 (up to Rs 9,000) per month."
I don't like this. I'm running AdSense and I am happy with my partnership with Google. And this kind of stuff shows up. Not good by all means, for the reputation of the whole framework.
PS. I'm not sure if I can drop the URL here, but since it's not my site or someone's else on this group. Moderators, please edit at will.
I suppose it's possible that some ad networks are careless about where their clicks are coming from, but I can't imagine Google or Overture being lax. (Certainly not after all the "I've been dumped for invalid clicks!" posts that we've seen on this forum.)
Get a bank of phones and a high speed net connection and then proxie all of the clicking.
Anyways, we've all said it before and it really is a foregone conclusion. Pay by conversion is the end result of all of this.
This article is a bit disturbing, though, as it implies a moderately high level of organization.
If they are making only $100 - 200 per month, either the commissions for clicking are stingy or they are working low-price keywords.
Doubtlessly large scale PPC fraud happens all the time, just in a more clandestine fashion, so even if this sort of "laymans ppc fraud" dies down the PPC companies will still have to adapt in order to deal with the professional fraudsters.
The biggest threat isn't so much to the PPC systems but to the reputation of the country where the fraud originates ... for instance look at how most people here view dealing with Nigeria.
and BTW roger...
Look for a followup article, "Clicker Jobs Hard to Find - Automated Bots Cheaper Than Humans". ;)
We're clearly past that point - those clicking jobs have been outsourced to India already :)
- Tony
....Clicks are bought to boost number of hits for web ads or online advertisers who are not tracking user location....
Guys this is not affecting Google so much as other ad networks and maybe even individual sites into selling their ads based on performance and managed by crooked webmasters.
Relax.
Its clickthru.net and other crappy sites.. Basically your paid to surf and stare at advertisements all day. What was that company that went under a few years ago... alladvantage or something?
I don't think this has anything to do with textual ads like adsense, but rather stupid programs that pay you to surf.
IF it IS an adsense like thing, i have a real hard time thinking that this Indian scam is "sophisticated" enough to stay under anyones radar. Living in India for awhile, I can say not much in that country is sophisticated at all.
I am still a member of MyPoints and I do make a killing there.
Paying on conversion basis is not a good idea beacuse what one site can do is drive a customer to others site, now it is on website to convince a buyer to buy his product, just like if A advertisement drives you toa nearby store to buy toothpaste brand A and on reaching store you find Store is NOT having or DIsplaying Brand A, then it has lost a customer.
I hope those who have written the article understand the consequences to a country like india.Don't kill adsense for india.
Commission Junction doesn't even accept applications from India, soon google will stop doing that.
I have atleast huge network of sites, I use almost all big ppc search engines.Not single time did I display my paid advertisements in India for the fear of india being branded that way.
Guys I want to assure that, it doesn't happen as it's being projected.If that's the case the ads won't be displayed at all in india.
I also want assure you one more thing, if you are having high number of clicks or impressions from one particular location or region in india, the ads are not displayed PSA's are displayed.
I am sure atleast organised crime doesn't happen mass scale, if it's happening , "google I sincerely request you to setup special monitoring cell for adsense publishers from India."
I hope just because of few jealousy people we Indians are not kicked out of the program.
because of few jealousy people...
I don't think so - Indian co-workers here laughed when I sent that article from /. - it's a well known scam in India and folks are trying to cash in before being "caught".
There are quite PPC few sites which don't even open in India.
I think this is due to publication of such articles.
Lastly Thank god ,it's not adsense at all.
I am sorry then I am not aware of it.
Aravind.
68687872 - 68688127
68732416 - 68732671
68789504 - 68789759
202031104 - 202031359
202031360 - 202031615
202031616 - 202031871
202032128 - 202032383
202032384 - 202032639
202032640 - 202032895
202035200 - 202035711
202425408 - 202425599
204018024 - 204018047
207951360 - 207951615
208367520 - 208367551
217313024 - 217313279
265052160 - 265069055
Yes I know this sucks and isn't fair for all of the honest folks who live in India, but I consider those people a casualty of war. As an advertiser the fraud being committed by those companies costs ME money - and since the Indian government seems to have no interest in policing this issue, then why not just black-list their whole country? Once they catch on that they're being denied access to content the rest of the world has access to, maybe they'll DO SOMETHING about the fraudsters and we'll let them back in.
Someone suggested "pay per conversion" - this is also not a good idea. Of course it seems like a great idea to those who are too uneducated, lazy, or cheap to build an effective advertising campaign, but remember the "conversion" is done by YOU not the advertising company. If I were an advertising company, my job is to make sure people SEE your advertisement - that's it. Getting them to the next step isn't my job, that is YOUR SALES PERSON'S JOB. If you don't have any sales people, perhaps you should re-think your business plan - it's not the advertising company's problem, they did their job. Pay per conversion ADVERTISING is stupid, that's what commission-based sales people are for.
Anyway about those numbers above, here is how you use them for those who don't know.
(1) Capture a Visitor's IP address - ex: a.b.c.d
(2) Use this formula to convert it to decimal:
(a * (256 * 256 * 256)) + (b * (256 * 256)) + (c * 256) + d
So if the IP were 161.132.13.1 then the IP number would be 2709785857:
161 * 256 * 256 * 256 = 2701131776
132 * 256 * 256 = 8650752
13 * 256 = 3328
2701131776 + 8650752 + 3328 + 1 = [2709785857]
(3) Once you have an IP number, you just scan the ranges above to see if it falls between any of them using a database query, function, or even If/Then statements - whatever you choose. If the number is within one of the ranges above, the visitor is in India - don't show them ads. Otherwise don't worry about it.
By the way - YOU putting this type of functionality on YOUR site won't help, this needs to be done by the companies selling clicks. If you happen to advertise with any of those companies, you may want to give them the heads up and offer this simple solution.
[edited by: digitalv at 1:40 pm (utc) on May 6, 2004]
First, getting access to a proxy in another country isn't something that EVERYONE would be able to do, so you would block out a number of people committing this crime right there. As for an "insecure ISP" I'm not sure what you mean ... if the ISP is in India they would be banned so using their proxy wouldn't help. Banning IP addreses would have a positive effect overall.
Sure, there will always be people who can find a way around being blocked just like there are hackers that can get into the most secure systems in the world. The point with banning the entire Country's IP ranges is:
(1) You can block out the majority of the problem, and
(2) Enough "innocent" users in that country will be affected to the point where the Indian government may actually do something about it.
It's not a cure-all, but it *IS* a step toward a solution. Kinda like the way SPAM has been handled - if the ISP permits a spammer, you black-list their IP address. This is no different really except in the sense that spamming is not yet illegal (while steps are in place to MAKE IT illegal it isn't yet) - what these guys are doing IS illegal and no one is doing anything about it. Kick a country off of a portion of the Internet and maybe they'll do something to solve the problem if enough innocent citizens are inconvenienced by it.
And because I know someone being "politically correct" is going to ask, *YES* I would be OK with this solution if the problem was originating in America (my country) too. If a foreign-run advertising company was having a problem with Americans clicking their ads for profit I would have no problem what so ever with that company blocking all of America's IP addresses. Even if it meant *I* wouldn't have access to something, I would understand why they did it and it would motivate me to lobby my own elected officials to do something about the problem.
If you are an advertiser and you belive that you lost dollars to people clicking from India, I would definetly welcome you to do so.
However, I belive as an advertiser we are all provided with an option to omit countries where we don't like our add to appear.Particularly if you are taking about Adsense add, then it can be done, by deselecting the country.
I think adwords & overture provide's that option, you don't have to do the sophisticated ip block for that.
Also Adsense is too sophisticated to see to high volume of clicks day in and day from few ip's (india)as you mentioned to ignore, it does do that as for applied semantics algorithm.
Incase of other PPc companies which do not provide the country option I would rather be sceptical abt the traffic that ppc sends then question where it is sending traffic from.
I think it's an advertiser's call, I did like to mention few more things as a positive note to few people here.
Indian online spending is significantly higher, even though a very low percentage of people own credit cards.
The last heard number stands in atleast 25 million people having credit cards to spend online.India has a huge number of software professionals who are potential online spenders.Even though telecommunication is mere 1% of population broadband still is available to every person who has credit card and software professional.
May be banning India for advertising should be based more on advertising industry and the advertiser then ppc search engine itself.
Aravind.
It's not a cure-all, but it *IS* a step toward a solution. Kinda like the way SPAM has been handled - if the ISP permits a spammer, you black-list their IP address.
digitalv, I strongly disagree with this kind of "collateral damage" philosophy (which is popular in certain countries of the world in our times), if in fact you actually MEAN it. In fighting spam, fraudulent clicks, "terrorism", Internet fraud from Nigeria etc.
Please take a moment to educate ourselves on how these things work TODAY, before suggesting things along the famous "kill them all, let god sort them out" line.
Email spammers quit using normal ISPs looooooong time ago. They use 100.000s of HACKED PCs at even the most reputable ISPs. Maybe even your home PC, or your sister's or your wife's.
The is the case same with open proxies. Anyone and I mean ANYONE, even the housewife in India, can configure her PC to use it.
In poor countries like those, people will sometimes resort to these things. It's a big problem for all of us, I know, we get "orders" from Nigeria every day.
If I can use an open-proxy-filter to disallow access to my email web-forms, I think Google is smart enough to filter clicks from open relays likewise.
Someone suggested "pay per conversion" - this is also not a good idea. Of course it seems like a great idea to those who are too uneducated, lazy, or cheap to build an effective advertising campaign, but remember the "conversion" is done by YOU not the advertising company
Yes unfortunately the pay per conversion idea must give many the impression that their advertising will be incredibly efficient, whereas they would be better facing the painful truth that their website sucks from a buyers point of view. But of course it will be easier to blame the advertising.
