By the end of the day, she usually tallies a few hundred clicks, yielding about $300 a year."
"Yankee Group estimated that fraudulent means are involved in 1 of every 10 clicks on text ads, which translated to a $500 million problem last year, when pay-per-click ads generated a total of $5 billion. Other consultants estimate that click fraud is much larger, perhaps a $1 billion problem affecting 12 percent to 30 percent of all ad clicks."
[washingtonpost.com...]
When they went to the one office in New Dehli I got a strange vision that there must be thousands of people just like that guy all over the world.
yielding about $300 a year. It's not much, but it adds up for the 35-year-old mother of five
Other consultants estimate that click fraud is much larger, perhaps a $1 billion problem affecting 12 percent to 30 percent of all ad clicks."
Who are these "consultants" who "estimate"? A bunch of drama queens!? Let's see their data and equations!
While I don't condone click fraud in any way, shape, or form, I don't have too much sympathy for click fraud victims. If AdWords users don't know how to track their ads to monitor conversion rates, and detect fraud, they really shouldn't be using them.
'Click Fraud' Threatens Foundation of Web Ads (Wash Post)
WP being drama queens? They should know better. Maybe next time the WP and Business Week should get together for another scholarly click fraud article. :/
p/g
By the end of the day, she usually tallies a few hundred clicks, yielding about $300 a year.
Is that after going thru 3 mice, a new computer, $100 in extra electricity and a $4000 carpal tunnel operation?
[webmasterworld.com...]
[webmasterworld.com...]
[webmasterworld.com...]
And for a court-approved academic study of Google's efforts to combab click fraud, see the PDF file at:
Rent a botnet and make some real cash.
A half well designed botnet will click 100 ads/day/machine. Spread those clicks over a 24 hour period at random intervals, to 100 different websites from a prefab list, and it becomes difficult to impossible for automated detection.
Multiply that by a 1k machine zombie botnet (which would be the smallest botnet you can rent). Each machine is clicking from a different IP, the IPs are spread out over the entire planet. Again, this spreads the load in away that makes it difficult to impossible for automated detection.
Given the millions of zombie machines out there, some very simple math starts to show how professional virus writers make very good coin. They are also rarely caught.
Botnets aren't just for spam anymore, and haven't been for years.
As for me, being a publisher, if anyone was excessively clicking on ads on my site, the only beneficiary would be me (and Google, of course).
Somebody please prove me wrong on this.
Besides that, is it just me who thinks that, considering the absurd state of journalism in America today, the WaPo and BusinessWeek running these articles in the span of three weeks is somewhat suspicious?
Gee, who makes money on print advertising? And who makes nothing on web ads? Print is under tremendous threat from the web, and these are just attack articles. It's all about job security.
Basically, just sit back and watch the noise. The advertisers will win their suits, or G and Y will settle. They do need better self-policing, I will admit, but the claims being made by "analysts" seem spurious at best. I'd love to see their methodology.
Washpost did not run those numbers, a research company did. Goog and Y! are free to post their fraud rate numbers.
As for me, being a publisher, if anyone was excessively clicking on ads on my site, the only beneficiary would be me (and Google, of course).
That might be true over the short term, but over the long haul, advertisers have decreasing ROI and therefore will spend less on this type of advertising. It's pretty simple math and could have a dramatic impact on everybody.
That all being said, Google's not going to sue, because a) it's expensive/hard b) that's not what they're good at and finally c) it only picks off the bad guys one at a time.
What Google is good at is creating automated systems that use user behaviour models to dela with these kinds of issues. If they continue to be successful at doing this, not only do they protect the interests of all involved parties, they have an extra feature to draw away advertisers from click-fraud wrought companies.
I'm on the adsense side of the coin so I don't really hve any data to support any troublesome increase in click fraud, but CPM is generally holding, if not increasing for me, so I doubt the sky is falling just yet. It's a potentially devastating problem, but since I can't do much about it, I just keep working on my website and let Google worry about the broader implications of click fraud.
As for me, being a publisher, if anyone was excessively clicking on ads on my site, the only beneficiary would be me (and Google, of course).
It could also be someone who's got a grudge against you, or who's trying to hurt a competitor--either you or the advertiser. Google's CFO talked about the threat of "competitor click fraud" in a speech a while back. (I think it was late in 2005, but I don't remember the date.)
My own information site, which includes AdSense ads, has been hit by clickbots a couple of times. (One time, to the tune of $1,300+ in a single day.)
Besides that, is it just me who thinks that, considering the absurd state of journalism in America today, the WaPo and BusinessWeek running these articles in the span of three weeks is somewhat suspicious?
I think it's just the usual "me-too" or "follow the crowd" syndrome. One guy breaks a story, and the rest have to pile on to show they're in the game.
I have a friend who recently completed a PhD which involved identifying botnet attacks. They're out there and they are a very real threat to everything attached to the net.
I don't doubt there is click fraud, however the media needs better stories.
My server is scanned between 3-10 times a day for message board vulnerabilities. I had to put in captcha type authentication to stop the v*agra spammers from posting dozens of messages, all automated, multiple times a day, every day.
The botnets still scan my server, every day - each time from a unique IP address.
And I know this is off thread but if you're going to promote a rigged program (i.e., allow parked domains and MFA sites to participate whose set up is one where an unintentional click is made just because the visitor can't find anything else to click on) then of course you're going to attract cheaters.
How do the news organizations find these people?
FarmBoy
How do the news organizations find these people?
They place adwords ads ..
" do you want to get paid for telling us how you scam adsense? ..is there corn around your house ..are you wearing gingham and pigtails ..single moms and retired folk preferred .."
;-)
I don't doubt there is click fraud, however the media needs better stories.
Do a Google news search and read some articles on terms such as shoplifting, employee theft, etc. and you'll get the impression that brick & mortar retailers are going to be stolen out of existence within the next few weeks.
FarmBoy
Compared to what? The excellent, well-researched in-depth SEO'd-to-death articles on AdSense sites? Where the vast majority of the site owner's time is spent moving the AdSense links around the page endlessly hoping to catch more clicks. Hey, now you can remove the border around ads so they look just like navigation links. Where people have to be convinced that "Content is King".
Also, the Post is on line also. They will continue to produce well-written artices on paper and on line, making money from both.
I find the statement that one in ten clicks (or more) is fraudulent to be beyond belief. 10% would be a very high figure because, as far as i can tell, the only way someone can benefit from click fraud is to be a PUBLISHER first, and then share the proceeds with the ad clickers, so, it would seem that Google and Yahoo could easily identify the bogus SITES.
Investors in engines and networks can benefit from click fraud, as long as advertisers continue to spend as much as they do on PPC.
There is also competitor click fraud, which has been discussed at length in this forum.
It is not so easy to detect click fraud. When botnets are used, for example, the sites in question get a wide spread of IP addresses, user agents, etc., ie. just as if a wide spread of people were clicking on these sites.
Besides that, is it just me who thinks that, considering the absurd state of journalism in America today, the WaPo and BusinessWeek running these articles in the span of three weeks is somewhat suspicious?
Not really. After all, to the extent that they have an online presence, they're just as much threatened by click fraud as any publisher or advertiser.
Since many of us are technically minded by the work we do, I think we sometimes forget how large of a population have no idea about their computer besides using a web browser. I am not surprised so many computers are compromised. I can understand spam being sent out, but who exactly benefits from zombie computers clicking on ads?
But I question a lot of those numbers. Anyone can pull an "estimate" out of their posterior, but few can back it up with real research. And of course none of them ever exagerate.
The passivity of Google is obscene and pathetic
... and very, very profitable ...
Seems to me this is Government regulation territory because the fraud is very big, often international in scope, and the SE's have too little incentive to fully solve the problem, which nets them perhaps a billion in extra profits annually depending on your estimate of fraud and worthless clicks.
What I'd like to see is an oversight group who has the power to refund to PPC advertisers an estimate of fraudulent activity. This would incentify the SE's to search and destroy the fraud.
Millions of zombie machines? Any hard data backing up this number or is it a guess? ...curious...
Yah, sorry, I shoudn't just pull a number like that out of my buttox without backing it up.
SecurityFocus article. [securityfocus.com]
(pulled that after about 60seconds of googling)
...an illegal collection of hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of compromised computers all being controlled with a common infrastructure. There's even one case where a real botnet was found with about 1.5 million machines under one person's control...
Poke around any of the larger anti-virus company's research archives for a while, and you come up with some scary numbers. F-Secure and Sophos come to mind.
That particular article even mentions the use of BotNets for advertising click fraud.
WebProNews [webpronews.com] has a brief article on an "in the wild" click-fraud botnet of 34,000 PCs.
He even has a nice little math seciton of the article:
10 clicks/day X $1/click X 34,000 computers X 365 days = $124M annual fraud
100 clicks/day X $1/click X 34,000 computers X 365 days = $1.2B annual fraud
100 clicks/day X $5/click X 34,000 computers X 365 days = $6.2B annual fraud
For the first 3 months of 2006, Google reported $928 million in "network" ad revenue, on track for $4 billion in 2006. What if 5% of that is fraudulent? What if it's 10% or 25% or 40%?
As I stated earlier, manual click fraud is simply not the real issue.
