Google and Microsoft Browsers Have High Ad Fraud

[glakes]

This latest story about Ad fraud may be a component of the recent lawsuit against Google that claims upwards of 40% of ad clicks are fraud. See [webmasterworld.com...]

Fraudsters can manipulate consumers’ web browser software for their financial gain by infecting browsers with malicious code and forcing them to load certain webpages. For advertisers this is bad news, since they can wind up paying for ads which can never actually be seen by real people.

The browsers in which the most fraudulent impressions loaded were versions of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser and Google’s Chrome browser, the study found.

Some 50% of impressions served to Internet Explorer over the course of the study were to “non-human” traffic, FraudLogix said, compared with 20.5% of impressions served to Google’s Chrome browser.

See: [wsj.com...]

[nomis5]

Microsoft might just accidentally leave a few more holes in IE that can be exploited by ad fraud. That way Adwords will go totally down the plug hole.

[ogletree]

I don't get why people want to click on Google.com search Ads. Google is the only one that benefits. I don't see any benefit in creating a way to click Google ads in mass. I can see hurting a single company or group of companies but this is systemic. The logical conclusion that Google must be behind this to increase profits.

Can you imagine the fallout if this was proven. To be honest it makes no sense that Google should be making as much money as it does. I have a feeling that some day they get caught doing something like this.