Maybe the truth is, stories about click fraud won’t go away….HIghlights:
A lack of clear standards for determining what is a fraudulent click, or some sort of third-party clearinghouse to monitor the situation, means some advertisers believe they can’t do much more than head to the courts when they think there’s a problem….
…Some experts say the solution is to have an independent auditor that would use data from the search engines and advertisers to determine in a neutral environment whether clicks are fraudulent.
Google and Yahoo, however, appear reluctant to embrace that idea.
Good news for guys like Tom over at ClickForensics and Micheal over at ClickTracker. Question is who will win the horse race? I would love to hear your opinion on how you see this one shaking out.
similar to something like credit cards, i think you have to be willing tolerate a certain level of fraud…but click fraud seems pretty rampant right now
In doing research on DNS Cache Poisoning and a recent topics at WebmasterWorld concerning DNS Recursion, I came across this interesting piece that is directly related to click fraud. It’s from 2005 April, but I do believe this particular method has been on the rise and few are aware that it is happening. 🙁
http://www.lurhq.com/ppc-hijack.html
As long as there are unhappy advertisers, and evidence (and proof!) of click fraud found, there will continue to be articles written about it.
Careful, John.
You seem to be suggesting that click fraud is a pseudo problem. Don’t let your many friends in the industry feed you that line. Out here in small business land click fraud threatens to undermine the entire industry. Remember, 98% of SME folks don’t study this stuff. We just see dollars going down the tubes.