Are Apple Products Creating Click Fraud?

[incrediBILL]

Here's a real simple scenario, follow to the end before deciding.

Wedding pros, photographers as a specific example, tend to have Flash websites more often than not, many 10s of thousands of such sites exist.

People using iPad/iPhone products surfing ads to find these Wedding pros, may be clicking PCP ads directing them to those Flash websites they can't view!

Therefore, are Apple products unwittingly creating click fraud by not showing advertisers Flash sites?

By enabling Apple customers to see the PCP ads, they allow their customers to take hard earned money out of advertisers pockets by clicking those ads. However, that money is quickly wasted by Apple customers that are not capable of seeing those Flash websites for the ads they just clicked!

Arguably the advertising network should be able to filter ads off on iPhone/iPad when the destination is a Flash landing page, but we don't know if they do, and until Apple went rogue against Flash it was never an issue.

The questions then are:

- Is Apple enabling their customers to unwittingly commit click fraud against advertisers with their anti-Flash Apple products?

- If yes, should Apple be responsible for refunding money, or help advertisers recover money, lost because of Apple's products incompatibility with the actual web at large?

What say you?

[buckworks]

I don't know about all networks, but within AdWords, advertisers can easily prevent their ads from appearing on devices that couldn't view their pages.

Apple, AdWords or anyone else should not be responsible for refunding money for a problem that the advertiser could have avoided with one easy setting change.

[incrediBILL]

However, not all ad networks are as sophisticated as AdWords, and not all Advertisers are savvy enough about Apple products to know they need to change those settings, like I said, before Apple went rogue on Flash it was never really a consideration.

[StoutFiles]

The real flaw is owning a completely Flash website. At the very least, check if the user is using an iPhone/iPad and redirect to something that would support them.

[incrediBILL]

The real flaw is owning a completely Flash website.

Agreed 100% but dual site development is expensive and if developers don't tell site owners they need it they probably aren't savvy enough to do it.

However, that's the web as we know it.

We didn't break the web, it was that way before iPhone/iPad.

Apple 'broke' their browser by forbidding you to access all of the web is my contention, which could now cause advertisers to lose money and obviously lose business because the site doesn't work at all.

<rant>Last but not least, the real irony here is photographers and graphics artists were the ones that literally kept Apple from sinking into the history books thanks to Apple being the only truly color calibrated system from shoot or scan to edit and print back in the day. For years hardly anybody used Apples except in the imaging arena before iMac/iPod/iPhone/iPad reimagining of the product line. Nice way to repay their patronage which is why I picked them as an example.</rant>

[piatkow]

Apple 'broke' their browser by forbidding you to access all of the web is my contention

No, webmasters have broken their sites by forcing visitors to install proprietory software.

[rocknbil]

Well, as one who "grew up" with Macs, there never was a true "color calibration," and can prove it, but that's irrelevant - Mac indeed was the OS of choice and the gateway of DTP, so the underlying point stands. Nice payback.

I'm on the accessibility side of the fence, I love Flash but it's a progressive solution, no matter how obnoxious the ban on Flash for Macs are, the responsibility lies with Flash site owners to insure everyone can access their content.

[Demaestro]

IMO the onus should be on the websites not the platform sending users.

If you are advertising a site and said site doesn't work across all browsers and platforms then the problem is with the site not the platform the user made their visit with.

Why advertise a site that isn't capable of displaying to anyone who visits it?

I understand that the idevice limitations are still "kind of" new, but there has been a lot of time passed since Apple announced they dropped flash support and there has been a decent amount of time since people have started widely adopting these "flashless" devices. Even the non-apple "pad" and "smartphone" devices that do support flash aren't perfect and flash runs them down quickly.

Every so often the web development industry gets to a point where we have to upgrade or become outdated. With Ie9, FF4, Chrome that time has come for flash. Like it or not.

Apple has made it's direction clear. Our choices are simple.... Abandon their users or support their users but you can't blame Apple for your site not working with the iDevice crowd anymore.

I would say save your advertising money and put it to development, once you have redeveloped the site so that iDevices work then put the money back into advertising.

Even if one believes this Apple's fault, Apple isn't going to change and you still have the same choice, support or abandon.

[Leosghost]

Apple isn't going to change

Until Steve Jobs is gone from the helm..then .all bets are on ..or off..depending how you think the phrase goes ( different sides of the "pond" diverge on that ;-)..'till then..build so the site is at least visible without flash ..

Btw.."click fraud"? term normally reserved for the deliberate clicking on ads with no intention of purchase from the advertised site..

Buying ads and sending itraffic to a landing site that doesn't take account of those who don't run flash enabled..is dumb ( and shows that many don't analyse their logs ) ..but being dumb doesn't mean anyone is defrauding the webmaster...just that they are too dumb to read their stats.

And it isn't the search engines job to protect dumb advertisers from themselves..the click reached the URL ..upto the advertiser to make it convert..not the search engines fault if it doesn't..nor the device used to access the URL.