When does something become click fraud? For example, how isn't free rice (www.freerice.com) click fraud? Its purpose is to generate money from advertisements from users who aren't interested in the advertisements. Also, is "click fraud" merely defined by TOS? For example, Google considers saying "Click these ads to support us!" click fraud, which seems silly.
There are two types of click fraud that come to mind. One is click or link hijacking wheras a publisher does not get paid for a click from his site. But, I think that what you are referring to is end user click fraud. Wheras the user is mislead into clicking on somthing he or she did not intend too. This method was a staple for many years. It has slowly begun to die out. But, I guess click fraud in its simplest terms is any link that misdirects or misleads a customer to a website which they did not intend to visit. Hope that helps.
That helps, but what about PTC (Pay to Click) websites? Are they considered click fraud because they pay their users to click advertisements? All the advertising companies that I've seen so far are against enticing users to click ads, so how can they be doing this?
From what I've seen of the PTC networks, they don't encourage you to click ads - but to look at a sequence of web pages usually, in the hope that you'll be interested in some of them. If you do get paid to click an offer on some of them, it's because the advertiser wants your email details - a lead. The reason Google doesn't want you to ask visitors to click an ad to support your site is actually pretty clear, when you think about it. Advertisers are trying to sell products to those with a real interest in them. They're not going to be happy having to pay for people clicking on ad without any real interest in what it's trying to sell.
Do you know of any advertisers that aren't strict? I imagine the advertisers that advertise on torrent/warez/cracking sites not caring.
Click fraud occurs in pay per click online advertising when a person, automated script, or computer program imitates a legitimate user of a web browser clicking on an ad, for the purpose of generating a charge per click without having actual interest in the target of the ad's link.
If the publisher delivers a high number of invalid clicks (frauds), then yes, that publisher is a scam.