"How Click fraud could swallow the Internet" : Wired News article

[godinu]

There's an interesting read in the January edition of Wired Magazine.
The article is huge so I won't paste it all here. Here's the link:

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.01/fraud.html

It offers a look at the various types of click fraud and also mentions splogging.

 

[mole]

Thanks for the link, god.

Parking pages with PPCs are major culprits of fraud, and huge proxy networks are used by sophisticated clickbots that can cream off thousands of advertising dollars a day without the slightest detection.

PPC is dying, PPA must result.

 

[graywolf30]

Okay, maybe I'm way off base here, but I feel click fraud wouldn't be half as bad as what it is if these contextual ads weren't so obvious....the same goes for 2nd and 3rd tier SE's. When I make a search for "blah" and I click on one of the results, "blahblahblah.com", why do I need to know what the advertiser pays for that click??? ( I am speaking of the SE's that list Cost to adveriser .XX after the page links in their results)

IMO, I think what they need to do is blend the ads better into the sites they appear on - get rid of the obscene "self-promotion" (Ads By Yahoo!, Ads by Google, etc). If I click a link for something that interests me, I could really care less if it's a link for another page on the site I'm already on, or a link that takes me to another site completely - as long as it delivers the content that I'm looking for. Do you ever see a plug for the ad agency that produces the ads that you see on television? Do you hear a plug for the writer who wrote the copy for the ad you just heard on the radio? The whole purpose of advertising is generate interest for your site, not the site who you paid good money to advertise for you, right?

Maybe I've got this thing all wrong - or maybe they do.......

 

[OttoYiu]

I agree with graywolf on this issue.