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PPC Fraud, Google Stands to Lose Millions
by Michael Klasno
Google stands to lose millions if fraud continues. It is only a matter of
time before the current problem of click fraud implodes on Google.
You've seen them, there impossible to miss, glaring at you on virtually
every page of your favorite website, those little blue boxes that
webmasters have become so fond of, the infamous Google Ad's. Everyone
wants to get in on the big bucks action. If you listen to the stories,
Google is writing some impressive checks and the temptation will be just
to much for the hackers. The target is so obvious.
You see, hackers don't care who benefits from their efforts as long as
"the Man" suffers. For many years now the man has been Bill Gates and
Microsoft. Hackers have done everything possible to disable his empire,
creating virus after virus just to mess with him, even the US Government
got into the act. Now the new giant on the block is Google and the hackers
are drooling with anticipation. It is just a mater of time before some
genius hacker figures out how to get a spider to do his dirty work and
turns loose a new age type of virus, the "clicker bug."
Here is a quick overview; the search engine advertising market is
currently almost $4 billion per year with fraud estimated somewhere in the
5-15% range. The majority of this fraud is done at the search engine
listing page level and most is accomplished by hand. The object is to
drive up the click counts of a targeted website to use up there budget and
consequently disable there ad or better yet get the company (your
competition) to remove them entirely.
Both Google and Yahoo/Overture acknowledge that the click fraud problem
exists. Their in house experts claim that improved internal controls will
prevent this problem from escalating. Their stated position seems to be
that they are concerned about click fraud, but that it is not a material
issue so far. Given how much they stand to lose if advertisers cut back on
advertising spending, this cavalier attitude certainly is surprising.
Industry research firm eMarketer expects $7.4 billion to be spent on
search engine advertising by 2008. At the current fraud rates that amounts
to $750 million, about three quarters of a billion dollars!
Now along comes the "clicker bug" and instead of attacking the case
hardened, almost bullet proof, servers of the search engine giant, they
crawl the internet and click indiscriminately on 3 or 4 ads per website
every night. The clicks would appear harmless and the bugs effort will
only generate revenues of $ .25 for the page owners. After all, the object
is to take down the man not generate revenue for any given website. The
search engines will be so busy guarding the vault against monsters they
won't notice the ants walking away with the refrigerator, but multiply
that quarter times the total number of websites available and in just a
few days Google could be overwhelmed. The only way to stop it would be to
encrypt every ad or employ pattern gif's like the "who is" pages do.
Grant it the technology is not quite there yet but hackers are some the
industries brightest, if a bit deranged, programmers and they will figure
it out. If I can think of it they can do it.
About The Author: Michael Klasno is an Assisted SEO Marketing
Specialist and CEO of Net Performance Group Inc. Net Performance
specializes in fishing and outdoor website design and marketing. For more
internet marketing articles by this author please visit:
http://www.netperformancegroup.com/Articles/articles.htm
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