well someone above there said 90 million is pennies compared to what it'd cost if their algorithms were divulged, that's their business.
Google agrees to pay $90 mln in click fraud suit Wed Mar 8, 2006 7:04 PM ET SAN DIEGO (Reuters) - Web search leader Google Inc. said on Wednesday it had agreed to pay up to $90 million to settle a class action lawsuit over advertising fraud by outside parties on its site, in a bid to put the controversy behind it. The settlement stems from a lawsuit filed by Lane's Gifts earlier this year in an Arkansas state court and is designed to settle all outstanding claims against Google for fraud committed using its pay-per-click ad system back to 2002, it said. The $90 million would involve legal fees and credits -- rather than any cash payments -- to all advertisers who apply to be part of the class settlement, once the judge certifies the agreement, Google spokesman Steve Langdon said. The case covers all advertisers using Google's pay-per-click advertising system back to February 2002 through the date when the judge certifies the case. The final settlement hearing is expected to take place in coming weeks. The vast majority of Google's revenues, or around 97 percent, are the result of pay-per-click ads, which critics say can be vulnerable to fraud. Bearish analysts have harped on the threat of click fraud as the single greatest risk to Google's advertising-dependent business model, although the company has downplayed the risk, saying only a small percentage of search ads are fraudulent. http://today.reuters.com/news/newsa...695_RTRUKOC_0_US-GOOGLE-CLICKFRAUD.xml&rpc=23
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,187284,00.html SAN FRANCISCO — Google Inc. has agreed to pay up to $90 million to settle a lawsuit alleging the online search engine leader overcharged thousands of advertisers who paid for bogus sales referrals generated through a ruse known as "click fraud." ...
It is good thing but it will assert more pressure on New comers specially MSN. BTW how they will compensate sufferers? And how Google calculated that amount? ...
Thats a big blow for Google, i think from now on their fraud click checking dept. would be more strict.
That's a very..VERY large sum that advertisers have lost due to click fraud. Google will definately be getting more strict IMO.
$90,000,000 at say $0.05 a click = 1,800,000,000 clicks. Crikey. Must be a bit of hurt money in there as well.
They suck already anyway. I had a site get over 100 clicks yesterday and made less than $5. Either they are disallowing some of those clicks or they are just paying less.
BTW this is already discussed here: http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=63974 Merged and Moved.
The fact that a number has been put on this settlement indicates that google know how much they have earned from fraudulent clicks. Hopefully in the future they will err on the side of the advertiser rather than themselves.
Yeah I read about this a few hours ago on Yahoo news. If it gets court approval it is a semi class action suit so it will be interesting. This may lead to more lawsuits for Google involving the same issue. Their stock has already been hit as well. I personally think unless companies like Google, MSN and Yahoo can provide exact tracking of who clicks on the ad (say IP address) their may be no future in PPC advertising. It is crazy that people hand over large sums of money hopeing that these companies (with the most to gain) will regulate themselves.
I think lots of publishers will be seeing less $$$. Ashame the 1% who cheat via click fraud screw over all the honest folk.
Except click frauder's would be targetting higher paying keywords. Still, it's a pretty impressive number of fraudulant clicks.
I bet the lawyers get 50%. If everyone who does not feel it is worth going it alone applies, each would get... hmmm.... 1 free click.
I would much prefer to buy unique users rather than clicks. If they tracked it by IP and cookie and guaranteed unique users rather than just PPC (PPU maybe?) then they could charge a premium for it.
I actually dont know what is so fraud about MFA sites (ones with absolutely no content on them). Imagine this scenario. Someone type in "fast car mods in blue city in england" and some random page comes up which someone made for adsense and it breaks TOS. However, the dumb user clicks on adsense, earning the guy some money. They go to a site with car mods, who paid for the user via adwords. Now this would be counted as fraud right? Except a user who was looking for car mods in their area has found a website that sells them. So they still got the business. Can someone explain why people consider this gross misconduct and click fraud?