Comments on: Study: Click fraud could threaten pay-per-click model

Survey finds that 27 percent of respondents say they've already slowed or stopped their pay-per-click advertising.

[sgeng]

Like any advertising compaign...

You have to experiment to see if it is doing any good. In marketing if you suspect that something is not working or worth it then pause the comapaign or slow it down and see if sales change accordingly. It should be noted that internet advertising can be extremely targeted over blanket ad methods. Its still new so buyer beware and all that. As an example, try dropping a 100K on classic media ads with no perceptable sales increase and tell me how that feels. Its not fraud, you just didn't reach the right audience, but go ahead and drop another 100K and see if you do better this time!

[208mbrandon]

Google and Yahoo enable Vast Criminal Conspiracy

The numbers that the SE's spout are downright insulting. Sure, possibly 15 percent OF ALL SEARCHES are fraudulent, but the vast majority of fraud happens on the segment of keywords that are the most expensive. Fraudsters choose to go after the most valuable keywords like "cancer", "mortgage", "financial planning", etc.

I have painful experience with the financial terms. My financial advisory site was paying $3-5 per click. After suspecting that fraud was going on, I enabled a cookie to activate 1 second after the page loads. As it turned out, a full 86 percent of my visitors never loaded that cookie, providing incontrovertible proof that the vast majority of clicks were not human eyeballs.

The result is that a much larger percentage of their revenue originates from fraudulent activity than what they claim. I would put it at 50-50.

Why would they go about fixing the problem? Google has built up a company worth 100 billion based on this conspiracy. Even a hint that 50 percent of their revenue is bogus would cause billions in market cap to vanish. Same with Yahoo. They are going to milk it as long as it takes for executives to cash out, and leave shareholders holding the bag. Hey, it's worked so far.

Mark
Free Link Building E-Course at http://www.viralinks.com

[caudio_roma]

You are absolutely right on target, but:

Well written.
But lets be clear that the click fraud is occurring not from Google & Yahoo search results.
Since click fraudster have NO incentive to fraudulently click on Paid listings then.
But that the click fraud is occurring due to Google AdSense and Yahoo equivalent since then there is 100% incentive for unscrupulous web site owners to engage in Click fraud and absolutely NO full proof way for Google and Yahoo to prevent this, assuming they wanted to prevent it. Of course they really do not want to prevent it, because they are making Billions of dollars from this conspiracy to commit fraud by the web sites that they enable to display Ads and make money from click on paid listings on those web sites. I mean 99% of these web sites have NOTHING to sell, their only source of income is click on paid listings from Google & Yahoo Adsense, what an invitation for click fraud :(

[caudio_roma]

Click fraud occurring from Adsense and not regular search

Lets be clear that the click fraud is occurring not from Google & Yahoo search results.
Since click fraudster have NO incentive to fraudulently click on Paid listings then.
But that the click fraud is occurring due to Google AdSense and Yahoo equivalent since then there is 100% incentive for unscrupulous web site owners to engage in Click fraud and absolutely NO full proof way for Google and Yahoo to prevent this, assuming they wanted to prevent it. Of course they really do not want to prevent it, because they are making Billions of dollars from this conspiracy to commit fraud by the web sites that they enable to display Ads and make money from click on paid listings on those web sites. I mean 99% of these web sites have NOTHING to sell, their only source of income is click on paid listings from Google & Yahoo Adsense, what an invitation for click fraud :(

[jsmith12]

Already seeing this

If you're in the PTR industry, you can easily get human bots to click ads for you, either ad sence, OR search and make the money.

Your cost? As little as a fraction of a cent per click.

Your gain? Target the right key words, and it could be a lot.

And with some PTR people intrested only in 'the money' and program owners caring only about the money, and forcing people to search/click ads to make their money, it's a hot breeding ground for human click bots, and hard to track click fraud.

And let's not forget iframe scams that are running in there too.

There are stories of advertisers who have actually tracked the fact that their entire advertising budget was cleared out in a week by PTR clickers. And there's been discution about it on boards where it's confired that a 95% human click bot rate for PTRs is not impossible, in fact it's the norm!

Dosen't seem too bad until you realise programs can send out 200+ search links a day. And if you have 1000 memebers in a program, you can get over 200000 fraud clicks from just one program. And there are a TON of these programs! Over 100 I'm posative.

[s_ketharaman]

Will Google Toolbar kill PPC Model?

Google Toolbar seems a step from Google in the direction of preventing click-fraud by killing direct navigation traffic or typed-in traffic, which is part of the reason behind click fraud.

[s_ketharaman]

See article in www.freewebtoolbars.com

That's the subject of a story on this website. Check it out, it makes a lot of sense.