Click fraud on the rise
p2pnet.net News - “Google’s AdSense scheme is a way a lot of sites, including p2pnet, gather income,” we wrote last month..
“The ads are keyed to specific product/services and every time someone who might be interested clicks an ad, Google pays part of its advertising fee to the web page owner. But unless a site is huge with all kinds of hits and, therefore, all kinds of people click the ads, AdSense doesn’t generate large amounts of money.”
A reality such as this is an invitation to crooked websters and, “analysts, fraud experts and now are openly fretting about the rise of click fraud,” says CNN Money going on:
“The main perpetrators appear to be competitors of advertisers and also scam sites set up for the sole purpose of hosting ad links provided by Google, through its AdSense unit, or Yahoo!, through its Overture service. Humans or specially designed software then click on those ad links in order to "steal" revenue from advertisers.”
CNN quotes Alchemist Media president Jessie Stricchiola as saying estimates of how prevalent click fraud has become since it appeared four years ago are all over the map, and that as much as 20% of clicks on paid search ads are shams.
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See:-
clicks an ad – Google ‘click fraud’ law suit, p2pnet, November 23, 2004
crooked websters - Google CFO: Fraud a big threat, CNN Money, December 2, 2004
