Nickname: Edwin

Review: Google, Yahoo!, and the others benefit from click fraud, and they know this. It's only for the benefit of advertisers and the general public that they have these click-fraud witchhunts. Edwin Reitstein http://www.easyrenovate.com

Date reviewed: Jul 7, 2007 10:56 PM

Nickname: whosclickingwho-ppcfraud

Review: www.whosclicking.co.uk tracks ppc fraud. In our experience, the percentage of click fraud varies with industry. Where the average may be 15%, say, for certain sectors such as finance, tourism, retail we often see ppc fraud of 40-50%. These are real costs, and not simply scare stories to drum up business. Of course, businesses will only use ppc if it's viable-equally. If fraud is not present, the business may be more viable.

Date reviewed: Aug 22, 2006 2:07 PM

Nickname: JohnD

Review: All this web engineering is obviously only really discussed by people that have no sense of what it takes to conduct business, or for that matter understand the supply demand profile of any healthy sustainable business. Businesses that buy advertising will stop doing so if the cost of advertising will become prohibitive, (To many fraudulent clicks) thereby forcing the search engines that supply the service to get their act together to be able to sell the service their customers are calling for and are willing to pay. If business are rushing in and bidding high for their keywords, believe me they are making money at it. If the Googles and Yahoos of this world will not deliver what the customers are looking for, someone will step up and figure it out.

Date reviewed: Aug 18, 2006 10:10 AM

Nickname: Cyber ID

Review: This business about Google not being able to deal with so-called click fraud is nonsense. Click fraud can be stopped dead in its tracks! Right now! And nothing is required except getting rid of pay-per-click in the first place and replacing it with flat rate dot-com master channels that by definion eliminate click fraud. Here's an example of a Cyber ID interchangeable "master channel" that connects at level three in the form of, say, <united.airpod.com>. All airlines, say, Lufthansa, can also connect with the channel at (in this case)<lufthansa.airpod.com>. Clicking repeatedly on a master channel does nothing because all advertising is flat rate. The Cyber ID network with hundreds of master channels or "pods" can accommodate almost every brand name in the world in an appropriate product or service master channel in the dot-com name space.

Date reviewed: Aug 17, 2006 10:29 PM

Nickname: Monkeyden

Review: The problem here is not that people are taking advantage of pay-per-click advertising. The problem is ignorant advertisers decide to buy a pay-per-click ads. Anyone who is familiar with the nature of the Internet, and search engines, knows that this medium prevents pay-per-click advertising from being feasible. This story makes me want to go start my own pay-per-click web site business. In will develop (quite easily) in parallel a utility that will programatically perform clicks on my customers ads. Now that's what I call self-sustaining! This type of business should be illegal.

Date reviewed: Aug 17, 2006 4:00 PM

Nickname: Scott

Review: It is worth pointing out that there is now a slew of companies (and pundits) devoted to analyzing click fraud on behalf of advertisers (some of whom are quoted in your article). While these businesses are frequently the most vocal about the click fraud "problem," their business also depends on it; in some cases perpetuating the panic and fear about the problem. The best solution is for the ad networks (e.g. Google, Yahoo) to become much more transparent and share their data/analysis on non-billable clicks with the advertisers. Google is taking the lead by releasing some of this data through their reporting interface. Much more can be done by the ad networks to help their advertisers understand the nature of the problem and providing them with tools to manage the problem effectively. Until then, you will continue to see all sorts of claims both from the ad networks and those whose business benefits from the problem.

Date reviewed: Aug 17, 2006 3:45 PM

Nickname: dctaylor

Review: I think you should bid for position on the page and use the clicks only as a guide for performance.

Date reviewed: Aug 17, 2006 2:25 PM