Good article on slashdot: "An anonymous reader writes "It's an open secret that low cost workers in India, China and other countries are hired to boost traffic for online ads by clicking on text links, banners etc. Internet marketers facing high advertising fees on search networks like Google are becoming increasingly concerned about this form of online fraud. This problem has reached a critical stage and even Google recognizes that it has been the target of individuals and entities "using some of the most advanced spam techniques for years". A Google spokesperson said the company has "applied what we have learned with search to the click fraud problem and employed a dedicated team and proprietary technology to analyse clicks." http://slashdot.org/articles/04/07/20/1234238.shtml?tid=217&tid=95
On Detecting Fraud: Q, "How much can a site make with fraud schemes like this? I was under the impession internet ads didn't pay that much anymore. Would the cost of even 3rd world workers not be almost the same as the profit from clicking links all day?" A1, "Desireable search terms can go for $0.45/click. If you have a website that forwards clicks to google, you get a share of the revenue, which is what is driving the fraud. One way to combat would be to compare the search rate from the website to the total hits on the website compare that ratio to hits on the google main page or to other affiliates. If 90% of the people hvisiting the website click on the ad link, it would be kind of suspicious. " <note, above didn't quite make sense to me, see below> A2, "Let me put it to you this way...our company does business in China, in (old-fashioned) manufacturing. The total cost of the product is $0.48/ea. The cost of labor included in that 48 cents is $0.015. That's right, one-and-a-half cents. The rest is materials, administration, and (a reasonable) profit. Google ads can get very expensive. A dollar to several dollars PER CLICK. Would you like to do the math here? " http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid...id=217&tid=95&mode=thread&pid=9747714#9748221 Thomas comments: I know this theme has been discussed before but here goes. It does seem a little weird to me to be hiring people to simulate clicks when a robot could do that. My feelings on this issue is that it doesn't matter if it's humans in india or robots in thailand. Click fraud is click fraud, and any attempt at click fraud detection would have to be fighting both humans and robots. Answer 1 was intriguing, but it didn't quite sense to me... How actually would this work if you're google looking for adsense fraud? I mean, other than same ip zillions of clicks, which is obvious. So this is assuming you can do ip spoofing, or you have a lot of anon proxy servers at your disposal, or something like that. (Or thousands of pennies per hour people sitting at various computer terminals that are all on different ip blocks, which amounts to the same thing.) Google knows: -- click through rate for zillions of advertisers, in a variety of business sectors. (both from google main and adsense publishers) -- Click through rate for various ads, on various types of pages. -- referrals from google search to the adsense fraud publishers page -- google tool bar views for many pages, including fraud page. If you're doing adsense fraud, the ads that are being shown on your page are also being shown on other pages. Google could identify that your page is generating a suspiciously large number of clicks for a page that does not appear to have the traffic to justify it, judging by google toolbar views and google main search referral clicks. However, fraud perpetrators could counter this by having zombie computers with the googlebar installed, and doing google searches for the search term their fraud page ranks high for, and clicking to their page from google. I can't think of anything else google could do to stop this. Conclusion: Google is screwed. Thomas.
Google also claims (to some extent) to be able to tell if you stayed and visited a site or just went through and "Clicked" ads.
Hey bling. So what? Now your robot visits ie, with the google toolbar installed, waits a bit, moves the scrollbars around, and clicks. By the way, nice amazon scripts Thomas.
Yes, well of course they can. It's just a matter of when your IP loaded the adsense content, vs when your IP clicked thru. The real issue Google faces is the humble proxy. Every ISP has one. Every Gov't dept and edu institution has one. Most corporates have them. Not all report client IP. None are compelled to. Find a busy funnel, and you've got yourself prime opportunity to abuse. Why does Alexa come to mind here
if you pay per impression or even per click you always have a tough job filtering fraudsters. however I think its a bit easier for google because they have the data of billions of pageviews every day so they can filter much easier instead of just "assuming" that somebody cheats them.