Click Fraud — An Insider Look

conq writes "BusinessWeek has a piece going inside the world of click fraud. It includes the record of a phone call the reporter had with someone calling themselves 'Kiss' who operates many pay to click and parked sites. From the article: 'Reached by telephone, Kiss says that his registration name is false and declines to reveal the real one. He says he's the 23-year-old son of computer technicians and has studied finance. He owns about 20 paid-to-read sites, he says, as well as 200 parked sites stuffed with Google and Yahoo advertisements ... He claims to take in $70,000 in ad revenue a month, but says that only 10% of that comes from PTRs. The rest, he says, reflects legitimate clicks by real Web surfers. He refrains from more PTR activity, he claims, because it's no good for advertisers, no good for Google, no good for Yahoo."

Oh oh, slashdot is a part of it

"inside the world of click fraud":

"Nothing to see here. Move along."

I guess I got defrauded into clicking on a story that wasn't there.

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www.clickmonkeys.com

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These "Nothing to see hear move along" jokes are getting as old as everything else. They were vaguely funny when there was a story about government coverups and such, but even those have happened so often its lots its effect.

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""Nothing to see hear move along""

You're right, that would only be funny in a story making fun of deaf or blind people. Certainly not in a story about people who click with no intention of using the page they are loading.

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I thought it was an attempt to discourage First Post Trolls, by locking people out for a few minutes from posting, if they'd refreshed the homepage several times in the last minute.

Good on him

It won't last forever, but I'd love to earn that money for doing that amount of work. Even if only for a few months. As long as he pays his taxes, and he still gets paid then great for him. Save up for when the bubble bursts while you can.

Hooker With a Heart of Gold?

I think I'd say the same thing if I was talking to a reporter.

I seriously doubt ethics suddenly kicked in at some threshold number of sites. Instead, I would argue there is some kind of point beyond which managing so many parked domains stops getting really profitable.

Between the cheating story from a couple of days ago and this, I'd say trying to earn an honest day's pay is much harder. It is for me anyway.

Re:Hooker With a Heart of Gold?

they either park a domain close to something else (slasshdot.org) or with a bunch of crap content copied and pasted from various sites, and hope the search engines think its actual content.

Then, as people arrive either on accident or through the incompetence of the search engines, people looking to buy stuff either click on ads or (more likely and more profitably) click on google search rank, and find stuff to buy.

This creates value for advertisers (because morons eventually click and buy), so money trickles down to the parked spam page maintainers.

Google + all are making money via providing a web of spam and increasingly worthless search results. The big question is: how long can Google afford to crap where it eats?

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Then the problem is obviously morons who click and buy via random adverts at rubbish domain-parked fake sites. If we could educate them to find things the proper way, there'd be no money in it. I suppose it's the same mentality as those who buy stuff adver

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If someone gets a product that they paid for and are happy with, and the click-through ad gets a cut, and the crappy site gets its cut... who cares? There's arguably no fraud there. A product was sold and everyone in the chain got their cut.

As for worthles

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It devalues the internet though. The people that actually buy stuff might be fine with it but people that see through the parking have issues with all their searches coming up with advertising junk.

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The internet as such a low signal:noise ration anyway it's difficult to devalue it.

Ideally this should make all the search engines get smarter - if Google drops the ball, someone else will pick it up. I certainly don't get too many spam results in my searc

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Yeh but try looking for hot pics of Jessica Alba on google!

If I had a penny for

...every banner I clicked on, I might have made may be a nickel. But the PTR thing gives a new meaning to that old phrase.

10-15%?

So 10-15% of clicks are fake, and over time this number will fluctuate up or down, never reaching zero. But the important thing is that this means 85%-90% of clicks are legitimately interested people, assuming your ad is clear and accurate, which is the responsibility of the advertiser. Anyone who has ever worked with advertising should know that spending ad dollars with quantifiable results that high is a marketer's wet dream.

Re:10-15%?

The problem is the clumpiness. If that 10-15% were evenly spread over all sites, you'd mark it down as the cost of doing business. But if the fraudulent clicks are being targeted to some businesses, somebody's being royally screwed. A greedy click-spammer might end up making 50% or 90% of a particular site's clicks fraudulent.

The upside, I guess, is that if there are a large number of fraudulent clicks, you'd probably be able to identify them as a group (say, when they come in a sudden spurt, or all from the same referrer). I'd love to see Google say, "OK, obviously you're the subject of an attack. We'll eat the cost this month and try to track down the jackass responsible, but you should probably take a month or two hiatus from advertising with us while waiting for that jackass to move on to somebody else. Sorry."

If that makes smart fraudsters try to even things out a bit, then yeah, I guess you end up just lumping it in as the cost of doing business. It kinda sticks in your craw that somebody's making something for nothing, but you pursue them the best you can and try not to dwell on it since overall you're making money.

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As someone who works in Interactive Advertising (net stuff basically) I call bullshit on those percentages. Not that I'd be shocked that a fraudster would lie to a reporter, but still. The article is worth a read if not for the chuckle you'll get when yo

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Wow, what a generic, uninformed, ignorant, slashbot response.

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Time for a new firefox extension, click burn, search for all the paid click links and open them in the background and send the returning advertising into null space.

I am sure with a little effort we can switch those click percentages around ;-).

Sounds fishy

If he's really pulling in 70K a month and only 10% of his revenue is comming from PTR sites then why bother with them. He's just risking getting caught by Google and Yahoo and losing the other 90% of his revenue.

Re:Sounds fishy

Yeah, I find it interestig that the reporter seems to take these vampire's assertions about their financials at face-value. Fact is, this "Kiss" fellow is far outside the easy reach of US law (Budapest), he's young enough to be amoral and stupid (23), and he clearly engaged in a shady-but-legal business in high gear. I wouldn't trust this guy to tell me the time of day!

I also find this very interesting:

On disability since a 1996 car accident, Ballard, 36, lives with her ailing mother and her cat, Sassy. She says she works day and night running Owl-Post, a five-year-old group named after the postal system in the Harry Potter novels. Sometimes, Ballard says she takes a break at lunchtime to tend her vegetable garden or help her elderly neighbors with theirs.

OK, so she works like a dog at this job, "night and day". Interesting, but...

She claims her take amounts to only about $60 a month, noting that if she made more than $85, the government would reduce her $601 monthly disability check.

WTF??!! Why is she working like a dog, night and day, for $60 a month? She could make more money selling Herbalife shit. Clearly, this Ballard woman is lying, too--and the reporter doesn't bother to question it.

It's almost a given that both of these people are seriously under-reporting their income, cheating on taxes, etc. And you can bet that both of them are pushing WAAAY more click-fraud than they claim.

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WTF??!! Why is she working like a dog, night and day, for $60 a month? She could make more money selling Herbalife shit. Clearly, this Ballard woman is lying, too--and the reporter doesn't bother to question it. It's almost a given that both of these peop

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Yeah--living on disability is a shitty, shitty life. It's barely enough to get by in a trailer park, let alone at a decent standard of living. But that doesn't mean she's not a liar.

1) There are ways, even on disability, to supplement your income. She

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There are ways, even on disability, to supplement your income. She could be watching children for familiy and neighbors, she could be doing low-end web design, dog-sitting, flower arrangements--there are literally a million little, tiny ways to supplement

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There are ways, even on disability, to supplement your income. She could be watching children for familiy and neighbors, she could be doing low-end web design, dog-sitting, flower arrangements--there are literally a million little, tiny ways to supplement

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You missed the point of this, entirely. I'm saying that IF YOU ARE GOING TO SUPPLEMENT DISABILITY by making up to $85/month, why would you work at a $2 per day job in order to make your $60? Why not work at a $2/hour job, like dog sitting, or a $10/hour jo

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> If you couldn't, and the only way to get more was illegal, would you do it?

Well, probably not.

But I don't understand what's illegal about clicking ads. You can only click an ad if you want to buy something? You can only click certain links once?

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> If you couldn't, and the only way to get more was illegal, would you do it?

Well, probably not.

You wouldn't? What would you do? Just stop eating, let them foreclose your house and take your kids to an orphanage? If you can't live on what you have

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You wouldn't? What would you do? Just stop eating, let them foreclose your house and take your kids to an orphanage? If you can't live on what you have, and there's a way to make more, you'd do it because you'd have to.

Where does this stop, then? Is it OK

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Could you live on $600 a month? If you couldn't, and the only way to get more was illegal, would you do it?

I've worked under the table for most of my adult life.

So I'll take that as a yes.

I was offered welfare and healthcare via the state but turned i

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Moreover, if earning $85 completely removed the $600 from the equation, wouldn't you earn "$60"?
You know, with finger quotes around it?

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because 7000 dollars a month is a lot of money.

Click fraud hurts in other ways as well...

If I am working on one of my websites, and I see an ad that I am interested in, I click it. But google doesn't credit me for my own clicks. Not that it matters much, maybe a total of 5 or 10 clicks over the last year, but they have the anti-click-fraud engine turned up so high, that once I log into google or my own website from an ip address, it almost certainly nullifies my ability to click on an ad and still get paid.

Re:Click fraud hurts in other ways as well...

If I am working on one of my websites, and I see an ad that I am interested in, I click it.

Be careful with that. Clicking on your own ads is a quick way to get your google account disabled. It's not worth the risk when some people have had trouble getting google to turn it back on again. They probably let people get away with it to a point because an accidental click can happen here and there, but it is against their TOS to click on your own ads.

The other mistake a lot of people make is telling others to click on their ads to support their site. Big no-no.

Yep. Manually visit ads on your site...

If you browse the various web master forums, you'll find lots of stories of people being banned from Google Adsense for click-fraud. Just to be safe, I never click the ads on my sites. Anything that I find interesting, will get visits by me entering the U

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I do know two people that have had their google accounts cancelled. One for clicking on their own ads, and one because all the visitors were in the same IP range (it was a college teacher's page for his students.) Both amazingly got google to turn them bac

When your handle is "Kiss" ...

You learn to keep it simple stupid when it comes to the business model.

No it's not!

"It's not that much different from someone coming up and taking money out of your wallet," says David Struck.

No it's not. It's completely different. It's more like handing out free samples, and to your horror finding that there are people who will just take any crap they get for free, even if they're not interested. It's like sending out mail order catalogues to people who just need something to put under a table leg to stabalize it. In fact, it's completely like, oh, let's say, paying a TV network based on pulled-out-of-ass Nielsen ratings, only to find out people go to the toilet during a commercial break! Who would've thought?

, MostChoice e-mailed Google to point out 316 clicks it received in June from ZapMeta.com, a little-known search site. MostChoice paid an average of $4.56 a click, or roughly $1,500 for the batch.

There's your problem right there. $4.56 per click?! What are ya, nuts?

Click Fraud or Domain Parking?

Make up your mind. The article seems a little confused about the subject matter. Domain parking is slimy, but assuming you're not paying kids from India to click your ads its perfectly legit. Granted, you'll here all sorts of whining CTR boards when google improves their system (again) to weed out content-free sites that have in the past made some people a good deal of money.

Click fraud is click fraud. When someone or something fraudulently clicks on advertisements to inflate the website publishers CTR and ideally stuff his pockets full of cash. This is somewhat more then slimy or immoral and is something to be legitimately upset about because it hurts advertisers *and* legitimate website publishers (who are competing in a diluted marketplace because of these automated 'clickbots').

PPC is down no matter how you look at it. Marketers, typically, jumped the gun on this new fangled advertising and spent boatloads of money 'targeting' their clientele without even having to research. Surprise. Not everyone is trustworthy. Right now google uses a blacklisting system. It is a thorny issue. If I wanted to blacklist my competitor whats to stop ME from hiring a security specialist in Croatia or Texas to start an artificial click campaign on their behalf?

Fortunately for if I considered my ad revenue...well, revenue, I'd go broke. I bleed money. But then its a good cause and my day job puts food on the table. Just keep those clickbots away from me. I can still use that nickle on the dollar! :)

For every stupid spammer there are two smart ones

Take a look at this graph [revis.co.uk] (the stats used are genuine).

I have seen the pattern one more than one site, for what it's worth. Amazing really, as a 2:1 ratio of smart to stupid is *way* above my expectation of humanity.

What exactly is 'legal PTR'?

What does a legal 'Paid To Read' scheme consist of? Is this just a wishful thinking exersize? "Oh, nobody gets hurt and I get to make some money clicking on stuff so it's fine."

Domain Parking Sites / Viruses

Just postulating here, but given the behaviour of some of the spyware and viruses I have seen, I am wondering if maybe this is related to the increase in fradulent clicks.

A recent virus I saw would redirect most traffic to those domain parking sites, and pseudo-search engines that (with names like, searchmastertoyou115.com) seem to be nothing more than a method for fradulent click through payments.

Has anyone else seen this sort of thing?

Click fraud shouldn't even be an issue...

The only reason it's an issue at all is that advertisers insist on measuring the wrong thing: the number of clicks on an ad. I suppose that's an improvement over measuring "impressions", but it's not much of one.

At the end of the day, the only thing that matters is whether or not an ad generates additional purchases of the service or product in question over and beyond what it would be without the ad.

So clickthroughs isn't what they should be measuring. Instead, they should be measuring actual purchases that occur as a result of the ad. It's kinda hard to fake a purchase.

But they're lazy. They'd rather measure the wrong thing easily than measure the right thing with difficulty.

Until they get their heads out of their asses, they'll continue to have these problems.

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So clickthroughs isn't what they should be measuring. Instead, they should be measuring actual purchases that occur as a result of the ad. It's kinda hard to fake a purchase.

So you recommend advertisers place ads on your site, then they tell you how man

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At the end of the day, the only thing that matters is whether or not an ad generates additional purchases of the service or product in question over and beyond what it would be without the ad.

Actually, name/brand recognition is one of the big reasons compa

Why is this a disaster?

I have to agree with some of the comments in the linked article. Even with 10-15% click fraud, the marketing impact of Internet ads is far more measurable than the traditional media. What percentage of the time are people paying attention to the barrage of TV, radio and print ads we are exposed to every day? How do you know? Just look at the description (in the article) of the statistics that the owner of MostChoice has compiled about people clicking on his ads! Location, how long they looked at the site, whether they became a customer, etc, etc. Being able to measure your marketing has its advantages too, even if you have to deal with click fraud. (The mute button and the bathroom break have not destroyed TV ads yet.)

What this really about is companies have paid for advertising assuming near 100% valid clicks, and upon discovering that they in fact only get 85% valid clicks, feel they have paid too much. The natural result, then, is going to be a 15% drop in the cost per click, both to ad purchasers, and in payout to affiliate websites which display them. Or maybe a segmented price scheme, where sites more likely to experience useless clicks will cost less per ad. The people setting up bogus ad-filled sites will see their revenue drop proportionate with their "success" at attracting bogus clicks.

Don't get me wrong. The more effective Google and Yahoo can be at eliminating fraudlent clicks, the better. But there is going to be some point of diminishing return when deciding what is a bogus click is not worth the effort, and you will just have to lower the price or risk losing ad-business.

This whole thing stinks

"The click fraud and bad sites are driving people away,"

Hmmm Couldn't be those pop-up, pop-under and pop-in ads interrupting normal internet activity that are making consumers mad at advertisers now could it? OVER advertising is driving people away. It shows up at movies, so people rent movies or pay for on demand. Ads are added to videos and VOD. Bastards! It shows up on TV, so people record TV and skip it. Now there's talk of no-skip advertising on DVR's. Complete bastards! They're all over the radio so you have to keep switching stations or get an iPod or satellite radio. Then, of course, there's ALWAYS telemarketers regardless of how many no-call lists you're on or what service you pay the phone company to keep your name and number unlisted. Complete freaking bastards!!

They didn't respond to requests for comment, and most of the sites disappeared in late summer, after MostChoice challenged Yahoo about them.

Extremely suspicious that Yahoo and Google may be funding these parked websites to multiply their ad hits.

Yahoo says it scans its network for PTR activity, but declines to describe its methods.

"Oh, yeah, if it's not one of the parked websites we fund... I mean... uh..."

"...it is going to scare away the further development of the Internet as an advertising medium.

OMG! The internet has some purpose besides advertising? How the hell did this happen?

I just hope that whenever internet2 becomes accessible that advertising is forbidden.

Moralist Scum?

He refrains from more PTR activity, he claims, because it's no good for advertisers, no good for Google, no good for Yahoo.

Ahh yes, this reminds me of my days as a mercenary for hire. See, I was a moralist hitman. I flatly refused to stab people to death. If someone asked, I'd tell them, "Look, I shoot them - 2 to the body, one to the head - or the deal's off. Stabbing people to death is bad for business."

Say Kiss, if you're reading this; do the world a favor and step in front of a bus when you get a chance. Your ad sites are not content, they are pollution.

No sympathy

Click fraud serves those motherfuckers right, for turning an interesting communication medium filled with real communities, into a wasteland of advertising and commercial interests. Most of the advertisers on the internet use fraud (or at least lies and ex

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Your link is broken. I kept clicking on "fraud" and the only thing that happened was that the word got highlighted. My finger will fall off before I make my first Franklin.