I'm advertising with adwords and this is my rule --- 1 dollar on adwords = 2 dollar profit ---- I'm not interested in Click fraude, i'm interested in ROI
Yeah, that's pretty old news..I'm surprised wired only just NOW wrote about it. It's been out for...probably 4-6 months already.
Ack, issues like this shouldn't be there in the first place - businesses who're spending all their time penny pinching are probably not making much in the first place and so try to recoup some of their losses through Google. Adwords ads are all relative, if Google somehow removed click fraud as a whole, ALL advertisers would profit more, and increase their spend on PPC, thereby increasing EVERYONE's costs and ultimately resulting in the same ranks and positions. It's a self preserving system, damnit. If they don't like it, why don't they sue AdCenter, Overture and the countless others (as often) then?
But what about spammy/irrelevant/MFA sites that waste advertisers' clicks due to bad design? Adsense Publishers on these sites don't pay a whole (if anything) just to run adsense, so it seems like with higher PPC values, these sites would just profit more, leading to more "site fraud" so to speak. True, this isn't directly a part of click fraud, but ultimately it seems related, because the advertiser is not getting a good conversion rate from these ads, thus making it eventually equivalent to click fraud. So I guess what I'm saying is that if the worry of fraud clicks alone is removed from the system, it may profit adsense owners even more at the cost of adwords advertisers, since the adsense owners would realize they can make whatever kind of site they want (MFA etc) with less worry of getting caught, since it seems (from my personal experience) that Google is far more concerned about "invalid clicks" due to someone actually being incentivized to click on the ad or self-clicks, rather than clicks from a spammy/TOS-violating page. I don't know, kind of weird logic, just my 2.5 cents