Corrupt Website of the Day
Hey,
One of my corrupt editor friends emailed me about this. Turns out someone was on WebmasterWorld begging for help to get reincluded to the AdSense program. When you search the email addy in the threadstarter's profile you get the information for his admin profile in another forum where he's telling people they MUST click on his AdSense ads ten times a day in order to help keep the site available so that they can download free mp3s... Here's an ad from their pages:
This reminded me of the other night when I was registering for a gay bondage affiliate program and in the signup area they had a list of countries they did not want to send checks to. Half the list read like the US Government's Terrorist Watch List, but also it sensibly listed countries where the proliferation of scams made the program a pain in the neck to administer.
So really, how many instances of click fraud does it take before an entire country receives, at the very least, better scrutiny of the people they let through the door?
Click fraud is a major issue on many advertisers minds. A search on Google News for Click Fraud shows headlines such as, "Online Click Fraud a Growing Problem" and I would have to agree- click fraud is not going away, it can only become more aggressive. Once the sharks have smelled blood, they're going to keep coming back no matter what you throw at them.
Google's done a great job fighting click fraud so far, but...
Of all the advertising groups out there, I trust Google the most for fighting click fraud. But it still makes me wonder if running AdSense on a Free For All basis (and catching them later) will in the future become a bigger pain in the neck than it's worth. If they're going to keep this scalable, perhaps an algo to lock out some sites may be something worth investigating.
One of my corrupt editor friends emailed me about this. Turns out someone was on WebmasterWorld begging for help to get reincluded to the AdSense program. When you search the email addy in the threadstarter's profile you get the information for his admin profile in another forum where he's telling people they MUST click on his AdSense ads ten times a day in order to help keep the site available so that they can download free mp3s... Here's an ad from their pages:
This reminded me of the other night when I was registering for a gay bondage affiliate program and in the signup area they had a list of countries they did not want to send checks to. Half the list read like the US Government's Terrorist Watch List, but also it sensibly listed countries where the proliferation of scams made the program a pain in the neck to administer.
So really, how many instances of click fraud does it take before an entire country receives, at the very least, better scrutiny of the people they let through the door?
Click fraud is a major issue on many advertisers minds. A search on Google News for Click Fraud shows headlines such as, "Online Click Fraud a Growing Problem" and I would have to agree- click fraud is not going away, it can only become more aggressive. Once the sharks have smelled blood, they're going to keep coming back no matter what you throw at them.
Google's done a great job fighting click fraud so far, but...
Of all the advertising groups out there, I trust Google the most for fighting click fraud. But it still makes me wonder if running AdSense on a Free For All basis (and catching them later) will in the future become a bigger pain in the neck than it's worth. If they're going to keep this scalable, perhaps an algo to lock out some sites may be something worth investigating.
