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"Internet scammers steal money
with 'click fraud.'" |
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An excerpt from Brad Stone of Newsweek
........ Someone—perhaps a competitor—had written a simple software program that
relentlessly clicked on his ads, burning up his ad budget and pushing his links
off the search sites by lunchtime each day. After spending weeks complaining to
Google about the problem and getting a partial refund, he finally yanked the
ads. "It was really bad," he says, estimating that he lost $50,000 in potential
business. "Nobody knows how to solve this problem."
Internet
advertising is booming. The industry raked in more than $9 billion last year,
estimates PricewaterhouseCoopers, up from $7.2 billion in 2003. The
fastest-growing segment, search-engine advertising, grew 55 percent alone,
buoyed by Google's blockbuster IPO. But victims are
now wondering if those bright clouds have a dark lining: click fraud. Google,
Overture and a raft of smaller search sites get paid by advertisers each time a
visitor clicks on an ad link. Perhaps it's no surprise that the Internet—long a
magnet for the unscrupulous—has minted a new breed of swindler that clicks on
those links not to buy the advertised product, but to accelerate a rival's ad
spending or even to collect part of the fee themselves (Using Google's AdSense
program, Web-site publishers can run the ads posted by Google and share the
revenue). Last month Google CFO George Reyes conceded that click fraud was a
significant threat to his firm's burgeoning bottom line. "I think something has
to be done about this really, really quickly, because I think, potentially, it
threatens our business model," he told an investors' conference ........
You may click here to read the article in its
entirety
-Bottom Line-
If your business is not in the top 10 organic results on google, yahoo, msn, etc. you are
wasting money and missing customers!
Sincerely,
Joseph Smith
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