Once i went to a site that was EXTREMELY Google Ad optimized and i thought i was clicking a game, but turns out it was a Google Ad then third time i thought it was a partner link and clicked it and found out it was Google Ads!
This is my take too, more or less. But, we have to define carefully what is and isn't a thank-you click. It's not a thank-you if you are genuinely interested in something, and likely to make a purchase or sign up to whatever. Webmasters are far more aware of the economy of Adsense, and how a click will result in money changing hands. As a result we are far less likely to click on ads in general. But does that make us immune to advertising, and a worthless market to advertise to? I doubt it. My point is, don't consider clicking on relevant ads that interest you as a thank-you, because if this is the case and you click, then everybody wins. Even if you don't decide to make a purchase, because the problem is then likely to be with the site you land on and what it offers, or misleading ad text, and not with the site that referred you, and non-converting traffic is also beneficial for discovering what works and what doesn't.
same here.. but you know who it hurts most? ME! all its doing is helping drive the cost of PPC advertising down its already bullshit with the 1 cent ads etc..
I know! I'm getting all these 1 cent ads and I hate it, I don't like 1 cent ads, I like $1 ads. Those are nice.
Eventually everybody get hurt: advertiser pays for useless traffic, website owner gets smart priced and google for example may get sued again for invalid clicks.
If you are not interested in the ad, then don't click it for the sake of clicking it. A "Thank-You" click will end up being a "Screw You" to the advertiser.
And anyone posting in here advocating this [awful] practice with signature links to sites carrying Adsense must be ready for commital. I cant belive the number of times I see blatant arguments for dubious practices with adsense sites in the signature - are these guys masochists or something? Google crawls all over this board (in both senses of the word) and big G will be watching you!!
Well I don't advocate this practice, and I've said it on multiple occasions around this thread. Nice crawl joke white spida, I'll give you some rep for that.
you can call it by any name but if you are clicking on someone's ads knowingly then it plain click fraud. And we all know thats not a good thing, don't we?
Its not against the TOS though right? If someone is on a content site, and they want to click on a ad who's to say that they might not actually be interested I mean Big Ol G does serve up ads that are relevent right? So even if it a 'thank you' click it could actually lead to people buying or being interested. Just my $0.02
I used to run a site that was in my forum sig, and i would get alot of people telling me they gave me thank you clicks (i took it out eventually). Could this lead to me being banned for click fraud?
Please do not make rob-the-advertiser clicks AKA thank you clicks, the will kill our "golden eggs hen". If you want to thank you the webmaster, give him a link, it will help him million times more than a fraudulent click