Imagine the following scenario… You open up your cellular telephone bill and you have been charged an astonishing $10,000 for last month’s activity. Convinced that there must be an error, you contact customer service to question the charges.
When you request a copy of the calls made to achieve those charges, the customer service representative tells you they cannot make that available to you because it would compromise the security of their platform.
What?! Sound hard to believe?
Unfortunately, incidents like this occur quite regularly in the pay per click industry.
Customers who once wholeheartedly put their faith in online advertising are beginning to question the integrity of a system riddled with fraud, corruption and corporate spin experts.
The problem, in a nutshell, is that the pay per click model is prone to illicit monetization opportunities that often are very difficult to detect or stop. Over the past few years, a prosperous underground click-fraud community has arisen where members are compensated to click on the advertisements of other members Web sites.
These “paid to read” or “paid to click” rings are comprised of tens of thousands of members who earn income for fraudulently clicking on advertisements.
In many instances, participants from Virginia to Bangladesh speak of earning as little as $10 to several thousand per month. This is income they could never have earned if the pay per click search engines were as successful at stopping click fraud as they claim.
The crux of the matter lies in the huge discrepancies between private click fraud companies and the pay per click search engines themselves.
For example, Click Forensics, a leading click fraud monitoring platform, routinely reports a pay per click fraud rate in between 16-27 percent. Google, on the other hand, claims that the actual level is closer to .2 percent.
When you stop and ponder the fact that Google generated $17 billion dollars in profits over the last twelve months, you can certainly understand how a 16 percent fraud rate would be enough to rattle the foundations of e-commerce online.
Somebody’s got some serious ‘splainin to do!
A few years ago, Google dropped a lawsuit and settled out of court with a leading developer of a ‘clickbot.’ These clickbots are software designed to hide and rotate a computer’s specific numerical identification, or IP address.
The unique characteristic of a clickbot is that it can space clicks minutes apart to make them appear much less conspicuous. Observers of the case reasoned that settling it kept the embarrassing news off the front pages and out of sight of online advertisers.
The question I ask is: Where is the outrage?
I cannot think of another industry where such an illicit wealth transfer can occur so quickly and undetected.
How large is the global market for evil? If this issue continues unresolved, I can assure you that the pay per click model will be replaced by something less prone to fraud, corruption and spin.
Harald Anderson is a passionate pay per click marketing expert and the Director of Search Engine Marketing at Clickbooth.com.
Download the entire FeedFront issue 4 here – http://feedfront.com/feedfront-issue4.pdf
FeedFront issue 4 articles can be found here as well: http://feedfront.com/archives/category/issue-4/
