How Click Fraud Could Swallow the Internet

[mole]

Pay-per-click advertising is big, big, big business. So are bogus hits on Internet ads. It's search giants against scam artists in an arms race that could crash the entire online economy.

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.01/fraud.html?pg=1&topic=fraud&topic_set=

 

[DogFaceBoy]

PPC is heading to the shit hole anyways.

 

[spiderden]

PPC is just about dead, Internet fraud is part of doing business and you have to account for it because the sellers are the one who take the hit. The end user who takes the hit gets their money back, the crook gets the product, the seller gets ...... I had one site that had over 3500 in fraud every month but it was processing 60,000, just part of it

 

[Shaggy]

What do you mean PPC is about dead?? Thats crazy talk.

 

[mole]

What do you mean PPC is about dead?? Thats crazy talk.

It won't die but correct itself, but what you will see are the following symptoms of the fraud flu;

1. PPC providers will shave off increasingly (discount) huge chunks of traffic and click-throughs that your site gets.

2. Cost-per-click will get less and less.

Under these circumstances, the deliberated frauder will have to pump in even more clickbots, more anonymous proxies, more human clickers, to maintain their so-called "revenue". Fraud will get even worse, its a vicious cycle.

The temptation is just too attractive to stop. You know who you are.

What will arise from all this will be new advertising models that will revert back to PPP (pay-per-placement) and PPA (pay-per-action), PPC is organized crime at its finest, imho, much better than email spam.

 

[spiderden]

What do you mean PPC is about dead?? Thats crazy talk.

Well 2 years ago we were spending about 15g a month on PPC and now I would not put a nickel in it, I can give you a list of web hosts a mile long that have done the same thing. To many fake clicks ....

Look at how much they got per click 2 or 3 years ago and compare it now, shows you right there it is about dead. They were at dollars per click, now it is pennies

Just my 2 cents worth... I dont' control the market,

 

[mole]

The worrying thing and concern is that domainers could be (note a highly qualified "çould be") one of the biggest culprits in this problem that advertisers are facing.

By literally putting up thousands upon thousands of domain names and 'sites' carrying PPC, it is possible to use bots and huge proxy networks to randomly cream parts of these huge networks each day 'just enough' to avoid detection. It will be difficult to pin it down to any one "domain".

The conspiracy theory here is that is the reason why people are paying so much in drop options for seemingly low grade, long two-three word hard to type names. I'll leave the rest to your imagination... :evil:

 

[spiderden]

Well we drop the ppc and started playing with backlinks, you can gain more traffic to a site with backlinks (text link ads) than you can with ad money as in ppc and banners etc..

With backlinks you do not have to worry about fake clicks.

Another reason I think the ppc market is going downhill, look at what adsense pays you now compared to a year ago, that means even google's advertisers got sick of the fraud.

 

[The Pain]

Mole, I think you are totally in left field, but, even a broken watch is right twice a day. Keep shovelling, I mean, contributing your dreams to the cause, as even dreamers need a leader.

The Pain

 

[stuff]

only %10 off World population is using internet in this moment, and its only going up.
then I really can`t see how PPC can go down???

 

[britishbulldog]

I reckon there millionares made every day through ppc fraud, but is it really fraud ?

 

[mole]

Mole, I think you are totally in left field, but, even a broken watch is right twice a day. Keep shovelling, I mean, contributing your dreams to the cause, as even dreamers need a leader.

Why is it that whenever I see your nick, it reminds me of "The plane, the plane.." :laugh:

 

[Beachie]

To a certain extent, PPC is self correcting. Advertisers won't pay $10 for a return of $9.99, so they set their limits lower until they make a profit (or they can't make a profit so they stop paying altogether). Click fraud definitely doesn't help, but it won't cause the death of the Internet, as the title suggests. I'm sure the kids at Google are smart enough to filter proxies and traffic from certain countries.

 

[droplister]

i dont think it will go down, i think it will evolve into something new, ive been reading a lot of articles on ppc becoming wallpaper, like google ads. I think things like http://www.chitika.com/ allowing more interactivity and options to the users

 

[DaddyHalbucks]

I reckon there millionares made every day through ppc fraud, but is it really fraud ?

What do you mean? You mean it doesn't count as fraud if it involves the internet?

 

[labrocca]

I am scared crapless of PPC parking. I think that's the real danger. Domainers have a BIG stake in their pages and their revenue and if suddenly sedo, namedrive, or fabulous get locked out from these parking pages then what will happen to the value of domains and PPC? I prefer to develop since content is king and repeat visitors who are real are the only thing advertisers really want.

Would you rather have dnforum.com site or a parked domain...assume they both had the same revenue. I would choose the site every time.

 

[britishbulldog]

What do you mean? You mean it doesn't count as fraud if it involves the internet?

No what im saying is everybody is clicking either on their own ads or rival companies ads trying to cripple them and it goes on in a vicious circle,every time you click on your own ad or someone else does to test the water,its classed as click fraud but is it ?
What really is click fraud, sometimes click on an ad where i could just type in the url !
Wether you rip some of for a dollar or for a million its still fraud !¬ so in that case evrybodys guilty at some extent but is really fraud ? or is this business in the real world as we know scheming,manupilating conmen which even the biggest companies in this world are guilty of !

 

[clemzonguy]

I think in all honesty everyone has thought about clicking on their competitors ads in the search engine. With the whole ppc market it was a matter of time before the media caught wind of it. I stopped advertising in overture because I started getting a lot of bogus clicks. The search engines benefit from not policing this. They benefit more from sending you crap traffic from "content matching" searches instead of the specific words you wanted to advertise on. At this point though regardless of the risks involved I cannot afford to stop advertising because the returns are still there despite this. The best form of advertising are type-in domains that relate to my product or service because that way I am capitalizing on every visitor at my own pace. When you don't own prime type-in domains in your industry you are basically at the search engines mercy. This can only be good for long term domain values. Quite an exciting year ahead now that the cat is out of the bag in every sense.

 

[Domagon]

Well said clemzonguy...

People with quality type-in traffic always have business while people why rely mostly on search engines have to worry everyday where their site will show up in the search engines ... and if using paid listings, how much will clicks cost, how many are bogus, etc.

Type-in domains are become increasingly valuable ... names with 10 or so type-ins daily used to be near worthless, now many are going for low $x,xxx ... and names getting 100s to low 1000s daily are often going will into 5-figures and even 6-figures ... while names getting mid-1000s+ daily are now going 6-figures to very low 7-figures.

For example, take one of my domains (won't mention name here - see the external auction section for name; PM me ... it's for sale!) gets 8,000 visitors per day (a few thousand pure type-in) with no advertising ...

Average of what advertisers for our type of site budget for is around 10 to 50 cents per click ... so for simplicity, say each click is worth 25 cents...

8,000 visitors x $0.25 = $2,000 per day is what it would cost for them to buy that traffic if paying on a click-through basis. To be clear, 8,000 is raw traffic and thus isn't trully worth anywhere near that, but $2,000 is still what it would cost them to get that amount of visitors.

Say the traffic is worth 1/4 of that in reality ... $500 per day (very realistic and close to reality, since ad revenues for the domain run around $250 to $300 day)...

$500 / day X 365 = $182,500 per year ... and with click costs, etc going up, the value of traffic continues to increase... illustrates very well the true value of type-in traffic ... and with nothing out the horizon for the foreseeable future, quality type-in domains will continue to become more sought and valuable.

Ron

 

[ERCollins]

Click Fraud, well there are some people that think this is a great way to make money.

What is hurting PPC is Paidtosurf and Click programs.

I have to ban and remove people from my parking program all the time. For using these programs.

I am sure if people thinks it is fair to have other people click there ads with no reason or really no intent to use the service or site they are going to. But it is all scams and it does hurt the PPC business, but I think as I do and most PPC parking services do, we remove these users as soon as we catch it and the advertiser gets the money back.