Here is a story I came across done by the NY Times on pay to click fraud. They were one of the papers that did an extensive write up about this a few years ago. Here are my past comments on pay to click fraud To catch some readers up essentially what click fraud is is advertisers paying money for pay to click advertising where the people clicking on the ads are getting financially compensated and therefore are not really potential customers.
How does this situation occur?
In short I can set up a web site and choose to sign up for Google Ad Sense where I display ads that are paid for by other people on my site. When a visitor to my site clicks on one of those ads I get paid a small fee by Google for delivering the person that clicked on the ad. Now in an honest world people set up good content and advertisers support that content development with ads. People that are interested read, watch, or listen to the content and support the advertisers by clicking on the ads. Everybody is happy, sort of.
The problem occurs when one person really wants to cheat the system. They put Google Ad Sense on their web site and use either automated software or worse a large network of individuals to go to their web site and click on those ads. Every click earns them some coin. Google and Yahoo as well as other advertising providers have forensic departments and ways of supposedly figuring out which clicks are fraudulent and which ones are not. I won't spend a lot of time discussing the massive effort this must take or the obvious mistakes that must occur. I think most of my readers are smart enough to figure out the obvious problems in supposedly catching all the fraudulent clicks.
However like email spam the main issue here is economics. There is a financial motivation for people to set up sites, display ads, and find ways to generate clicks both legitimately and fraudulently. The one power on the planet I have utmost respect for is the power of economics. As long as their is economic gain to be had people will find a way to subvert and move around almost any type of blockade or system created to stop them from doing said activity. Simply put no matter what Google or Yahoo do they will never stop click fraud because the financial incentive is there to subvert any protections they put in place.
However one option not explored is to remove the financial incentive. If advertisers weren't paid by the click or Ad Sense didn't exist then the only money to be made would be by Google or Yahoo themselves and it becomes pretty simple to figure out who benefits then.
The issue however is a complex one because some people completely support their web businesses on ad revenue. These individuals provide excellent in demand content that people will read, watch, etc. and then support the advertisers. I am not suggesting this model go away I am simply saying that as long as dishonest individuals have an economic incentive to perform or encourage click fraud this will be a problem.
Right now Google has a methodology in place to track the quality of landing pages and ads. Poor ads and landing pages will pay more money for advertising and ultimately could find their ads disabled if they are too poor. Perhaps a model that evaluates the content on web sites where people will display ads is a good idea. I realize this is subjective and who gets to decide the standards, but we have all seen "web sites" that are simply parked domains loaded up with advertising links. This type of thing is not good content.
There is a distinct probability that those sites are major sources of click fraud because their isn't really any content of value on said site. It is simply taking advantage of a domain name and maybe the owner is perpetrating fraud by using automated software to go to the domain and generate clicks or writes a virus that infects computers to go generate these clicks. The hardest to detect is when the domain owner sets up a willing network of individuals to go and click on these ads. This last scenario looks like a real people doing a legitimate click through.
Therefore, I am suggesting two key things. One, as long as economic interest is there to perform click fraud it will always occur and the only way to completely stop the fraud is remove the economic interest. The second key take away is that a good first step to removing the economic motivation, at least, partially, is to judge content. Quality content providers get ads and poor or non-existent content does not. How one judges content and what is quality is an argument for another day.
