tyBit: Zero Click Fraud
September 11, 2008
I’m getting my bobbin loaded and squirting the trestle on my sewing machine. It’s almost time for Project Runway, my favorite television show. I put down my can of 3 in 1 oil and scanned my newsreader for gewgaws. What did I see? A story in the prestigious Forbes Magazine about a new search engine called tyBit. I put down my bobbin and picked up my mouse. The paragraph in the Business Wire story on the lofty Forbes.com’s Web site said here:
tyBit is the only Internet search solution that eliminates click fraud for its advertisers and provides itemized billing for all advertising dollars spent. It is also a no-cost private label search engine for traditional media so they can win back their advertisers, subscribers and revenue.
I navigated to the tyBit Web site, which was new to me, and saw this splash page complete with my tyBit “man”.
I ran my favorite query “ArnoldIT Google” and received this list of results:
I was happy. The first hit pointed to something I had written.
I then ran an image search on the query “arnoldit” and saw this:
There I was in bunny rabbit ears in 1981 and in 2007 with my lifetime achievement award for ineptitude. Happy again.
But I clicked on the ad with label “Get free advertising now.” I don’t do advertising. No one hires me anyway. I clicked on the ad, hit back, and then clicked again. What do you know? Click fraud; that is, the click with no intent to buy. In fact, I did it seven or eight times until I decided that the zero click fraud assertion did not apply to house ads on queries about “ArnoldIT Google.”
The site indexes images, video, news, music, “local” and “shop”. I found a line to sign up for tyBit mail. I did not click on each of these links. Project Runway awaits. The Forbes.com write up provides some metrics about the company:
- More than 6,000 advertisers test the click fraud technology
- The site averages 2.1 million search per day and 50 million searches in August 2008
- One advertiser got more than 40 leads.
Sounds good. My suggestion is read the Forbes.com write up, explore the tyBit site here, and make up your mind. Google’s dominance does not seem to intimidate Clarence Briggs, CEO of tyBit. I have added this company to my watch list. Lots of search innovation out there right now there is, there is.
Stephen Arnold, September 11, 2008
Comments
14 Responses to “tyBit: Zero Click Fraud”
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Mr. Arnold,
Thanks for taking a peek at tyBit… we are working very hard to ensure that our users and advertisers have the best experience possible and your feedback serves us well during these early stages of tyBit’s release.
On your comment
“But I clicked on the ad with label “Get free advertising now.” I don’t do advertising. No one hires me anyway. I clicked on the ad, hit back, and then clicked again. What do you know? Click fraud; that is, the click with no intent to buy. ”
The advertisement you saw is a tyBit advertisement that appears when no advertisers under the keyword or phrase used during the query are present. In this case, your phrase, “ArnoldIT Google” doesn’t have any ads associated with it so we provide our users the ability to register that keyword or phrase within the tyBit Global Keyword Registry. (More information on our advertising programs can be found here: http://www.tybit.com/advertisers.php) Due to the fact that all advertisements which are located within the registry have a predetermined position, price, and duration within our sponsored results there simply is no click fraud. In short, our “keyword owners” enjoy as many clicks as they can handle for one flat fee.
On our PPC offering we have enabled a CAPTCHA system which requires our search engine users to input a randomly generated code with each click prior to landing on the requested advertisers page. This option for our advertisers is a deterrent which obviously isn’t a 100% full proof method to prevent click fraud but we feel it is a considerable step in the right direction.
I certainly hope this clears up any confusion and thanks again for your great feedback as well as your time to review and comment on tyBit.
With Kind Regards,
Sean A. McCoy
Chief Marketing Officer
tyBit, Inc.
http://www.tyBit.com
smccoy@tyBit.com
Sean A McCoy,
No problemo. Watch those categorical affirmatives. I jump all over them.
Stephen Arnold, September 11, 2008
Tybit is poaching domains hosted by AIT by redirecting 404 page not found errors to a Tybit page. They are commiting click fraud by claiming those page views are being generated by the Tybit engine. This probably results in a very large number of page views.
This is funny because Tybit claims to be click fraud free. Wonder how all of their clients feel about AIT directing the visitors to Tybit with no way to get back to their site. It redirects all of the hosted domains of the resellers too.
If you are hosted by AIT and have not set up a custom 404 page your conf file probably has the redirect.
I just started having redirects to tybit.com on 404’s and I WILL NOT have anything to do with any company associated or owned by AITcom. The services provided by them were horrible and I certainly won’t help them generate revenue by some sort of domain redirects to advertiser sites. I also have issues with any redirect that isn’t telling me it’s a redirect and that redirect goes to a site which no company information, no contact information, no nothing to show you who your are dealing with.
As to the service provided let me just say during the recent round of DNS updates AIT had a major outage that took multiple sites that I know of down for a week and lost a weeks worth of business email. They made no offer to try and recover the lost email, refund for downtime or fully explain why their update to DNS caused this problem. Let me be clear here AIT admitted they did an update, they admitted they broke the websites yet a week later those sites and email servers were still down and AIT acted as if it was of no concern to them. Not to get on a total rant about them but I also have contacted them concerning a domain name hijack which they have refused to correct no matter what documentation has been provided and in fact told me on the phone when I mentioned ICANN, “go ahead and contact ICANN, see if we care or it makes us make any changes.”
Looks like I need to add a new Firewall blocking rule for all our managed networks.
JamesB,
Thanks for the long comment. I am confused. If you want to critique a Web site, please, make it clear who or what is the problem. For example, I checked ait.com, and the landing page was a typical hosting outfit. These are mostly average, and if you know what you are doing, you can squeeze acceptable service from these outfits.
I am not sure how your comment links to a vendor who says “We don’t tolerate click fraud.” Am I missing something?
Stephen Arnold, October 10, 2008
We are angry at AIT/Tybit because they are stealing visitors to their customers websites and claiming them as coming from their search engine. They profit from any clicks resulting from that redirect. It is a click they do not deserve. They do not inform their customers they are doing it.
Some of their users purchase keywords form google, yahoo, and others so AIT is benefiting from what their customers have paid for and are not telling them they are doing it. It is not direct click fraud but it is is getting clicks fraudulently
Think of of many visitors the steal from the more than 200,000 domains they host. One website says 404s run about 2%.
Mischa
Thanks for taking the time to provide detail. Your comments help illuminate some of the shadows in the world of search.
Stephen Arnold, October 18, 2008
To Mischa & JamesB, I agree with you in that NO hosting service should have the right to change your 404 pages without your consent! Unless it is free hosting. But If this is really happening then calling AIT customer service would be a great idea surely you aren’t the only one experiencing this from the sound of it and if you voice it enough they will realize that it is wrong-hopefully. Agreed that when a visitor reaches a url in error they should have a 404 page with a back link and an explanation as to the error.
And for Stephen. As for the Click Fraud issue being hammered here I am a Global Keyword Registrar and a tyBit Advar. I do not work for tyBit or AIT I am a Search Engine Marketer and own GlobalKeywordRegistrar.com. I manage my clients PPC & GKR campaigns in the tyBit network as well as other top paid search providers. I just want to add a little something to the comment from Sean McCoy:
PPC is very hard to eliminate click fraud and offering CAPTCHA as a click fraud deterrent is one way to battle it. Click fraud is actually when a publisher publishes ads from the content network on their own site and then has the ads clicked by either hiring people to do so or using a bot. This person or business will profit from the clicks thereby becoming fraud. Just by clicking a paid search ad and then returning back to where you came is not fraud unless you are profiting from it.
Another article on click fraud from Business Week: http://www.ait.com/presskit/BusinessWeek_CFArticle.pdf
You can also find a ton of other articles about tyBit and AIT at their press release address: http://www.tybit.com/pressroom.php
Actually if you really want to know what the hype is all about with the tyBit claim of click fraud free ads then you must have a look at the Global Keyword Registry (GKR) for this is truly their main piece of arsenal in the battle of Click Fraud. Check out the Global Keyword Registry here at this link: https://ads.tybit.com/moreinfo
1) A GKR ad looks the same as a PPC ad.
2) A GKR ad has the same positioning as a PPC ad.
Two things that differ between GKR & PPC ads
1) The GKR ad has a fixed price for a predetermined period-Unlimited Clicks.
2) ABSOLUTELY NO CLICK FRAUD!!!
Stephen how do you know the ad you clicked on wasn’t an ad in the GKR side of the network?
You couldn’t have possibly known because the GKR ads are in the same place and position as the PPC ads. The GKR ads boast unlimited clicks so when you place an ad in the GKR network with tyBit it will show your ad 24hrs a day for the predetermined period bought. A PPC ad will time out when your funds are depleted.
Just my tidbit
Dennis Espindola
OodlesSearch.com
GlobalKeywordRegistrar.com
Dennis Espindoia,
I know zero about ads. I know that we can trigger a click with a script. How does any system identify a bogus ad. Google has trouble of sorts with link farms., Ads are just as fragile.
Stephen Arnold, December 17, 2008
Stephen,
Google, tyBit and other search engines that provide paid search have algorithms in place that watch for specifics like ip addresses & frequency of the clicks to PPC ads. Google and most other paid search providers will refund clicks determined to be fraudulent. In some cases clicks may get through that are seen as fraud so looking at campaign reporting is a good way to to be sure. You can submit these clicks you find in the reports for review and in most cases those will be refunded as well.
One of the ways to get around most of the click fraud with Googles Adwords system is to limit your campaigns to Googles search network and not allow your ads to be published to their content network. The content network is where an extremely large amount of publishers of the Google adsense program are showing your ads on their site to earn revenue. By taking them out of the equation you are able to show your ads in the Google search only. This is a selection inside your Google adwords account remember though if you do turn off the content network you will possibly be shutting your site down from possible clients I only suggest doing this if you suspect click fraud in your account or if you are just starting off with PPC as your adspend can be outragous if you are in experienced with PPC.
As for link farms Google can’t stand them but that doesn’t mean they won’t index them. It seems Google will actually look into these farms just to see the outbound links. Why would they want to waste the super computers time doing this? It’s easy they look at all link farm outbound links as spam and they treat the site their pointing to as the same. If you want your website to die slowly then use link farms. Google will slowly weed you out of their index and you’ll be lucky if they leave you one link to your home page. They only want to see natural inbound links to your site and they watch closely to the anchor text in the link as well as the content of the site with the referring link.
You are right about the ads being fragile because they can be indexed also and if the ad copy doesn’t match the site it’s looks spammy to the engines algorithm. You must be ever so careful with ad & website copy/content these days or you can get a huge Google slap in the face one day in the index receiving nice traffic and the next day nothing at all. But that is something a couple of bucks in your PPC account can cure though. Even for the fresh new websites that are waiting for the Organic positioning in Google to take off PPC can cure that long wait for free Google traffic. Some web designers don’t even grasp the SEO idea and how crucial it is to your indexing in Google and never do get that free traffic. These sites must live off of PPC campaigns and that is why I’m a SEM specialist so that I can help these sites join the big boys.
Don’t wait for the vast amounts of traffic that you could get for free. You need to be on the PPC bandwagon from the beginning and after you start benifiting form the nice SEO on your site and get that free traffic reduce the adspend a bit but don’t cut it off you’ll be loosing customers. Even the big boys still use PPC even though they are ranked #1 for gobs of keywords. The more clients/customers you get the better then it’s all about the conversion not the amount of traffic.
Dennis Espindola,
I love the “you” and the parental advice. Geese in general are tough to herd. This goose in particular is indifferent to ads, to traffic, to revenue from this miserable Web log, and sites that lack original, engaging content. Probably a good idea not to park your car in the vicinity of Harrod’s Creek. Geese are unpredictable in some habits. I can just hear you saying to one of my goslings, “You shouldn’t have done that!” Doesn’t work very well in my experience.,
Stephen Arnold, December 19, 2008
Stephen Arnold,
I didn’t want it to sound like I was telling you what to do, it was more geared towards any curious soul out there that happens to stumble on your post from Google. I’m sorry and apologize if I replied to your post in such a way that might have offended you. I was only trying to get the right message out since you were hammering A company for click fraud when you were clearly mis-informed as to which type of advertising they offer is click fraud free. Only trying to protect a new service that is my livelihood.
I understand you don’t like advertising and depend on SEO and social networks to drive your traffic. Thats all fine and dandy but there are some folks out there that truly depend on paid search traffic and other forms of advertising.
But basically if you want ads that are in a placement mirroring PPC ads and want them at the lowest cost then you can get the #1 spot for your keyword for a month for a 100dollars. This looks just like a PPC Ad has the same placement, stays up for 24/7 until the 30 days is up and it holds it’s position and is not affected by PPC bidding. Go to http://www.tyBit.com/advertisers.php to find out more.
Again I apologize, I was merely trying to convey the message that tyBit does have click fraud free advertising it is the GKR ads and they are trying every possible way to contain click fraud with PPC ads.
Dennis
Dennis Espindola,
Thanks for writing. Apologizing to a goose is not necessary. Do you say, “I’m sorry” when you wolf down a holiday turkey? My Web log. My choice of how to respond so I don’t lose my ideas. Read what i write here if you want a different view of search and content processing. Look elsewhere–for example, azure chip consultants and newly minted “experts”–for received wisdom. I fly in clean air.
Stephen Arnold, December 22, 2008
From Dennis on December 18th, 2008 4:57 pm: “But If this is really happening then calling AIT customer service would be a great idea surely you aren’t the only one experiencing this from the sound of it and if you voice it enough they will realize that it is wrong-hopefully.”
Good luck with that! No one in tech support knew/knows why those new 404 pages were popping up. Got calls all the time about problems with pages because of it. The funniest thing you said was the part about contacting customer service. I have not had such a good laugh in a while! AIT and “heroic customer service.” lmao