Click Fraud: Sucking Your Recession Bucks?

October 23, 2010

I don’t do online advertising. I don’t do sales. I don’t do marketing except this opinion-charged blog in the persona of an addled goose. But if you do online advertising, you will want to read about the alleged click fraud reported in “Click Fraud Rate Jumps in Q3 Behind Botnets.” Sports fans, put on your protective gear. You will find a real helmet to helmet collision. Here’s one passage that will make online advertisers see red, red ink that is.

Click fraud is a scheme where a person, automated script or computer program mimics a legitimate user clicking on an online ad to make money from a pay-per-click arrangement. According to a new report by Click Forensics, the click fraud rate was 22.3 percent in the third quarter of 2010, up from 18.6 percent in the previous quarter and 14.1 percent in the third quarter of 2009.

In case you did not get the point, here’s another allegation:

“While most third-party ad networks and all major search engines typically apply filters before charging advertisers, we have seen some advertisers waste as much as 10 percent of their monthly spend on invalid traffic and fraud.”

Yankee Doodle Dandy! In a lousy economic climate that’s some serious money. Now we ask, “Are these allegations accurate?” Don’t know. Or we ask, “What’s the method behind the shocking numbers?” Don’t know. And we ask, “Who else has these data?” Snap. No info.

If true, what are the online ad outfits who are rolling in dough doing to control this alleged issue? Now don’t give me Buffy the PR lady from Reed College. How about some info? The goose is thankful he has no need to hustle folks for money. The ads in this blog come from myself and the Google. Would the Google tolerate click fraud? Does a bear…?

Stephen E Arnold, October 22, 2010

Freebie which is definitely different from an online ad.

Written by Stephen E. Arnold · Filed Under Business strategy, Financial, Marketing, News, Online (general), Technology

Comments

One Response to “Click Fraud: Sucking Your Recession Bucks?”

Just how Pay per click marketing Can certainly Generate A person Major money. | markawhitesite.com on October 23rd, 2010 12:23 pm

[…] Click Fraud: Sucking Your Recession Bucks? (arnoldit.com) […]

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Stephen E. Arnold monitors search, content processing, text mining and related topics from his high-tech nerve center in rural Kentucky. He tries to winnow the goose feathers from the giblets. He works with colleagues worldwide to make this Web log useful to those who want to go "beyond search". Contact him at sa [at] arnoldit.com. His Web site with additional information about search is arnoldit.com.