ANTenna Blog -- Business & E-Business

Click-Fraud Rates On the Rise

Posted by Gayle Kesten Thursday, Jan 31, 2008, 02:51 PM ET

Despite efforts to stop pay-per-click fraud, the industry average continued to rise last year, up 15 percent over 2006.

Pay-per-click is a popular online advertising model in which an advertiser pays only when a prospective customer clicks on an ad to visit its Web sites. Sounds good in theory, but invalid clicks coming from botnets, for example, has the potential to deplete an SMB's online marketing budget.

"Fraudsters are using more sophisticated means to perpetrate click fraud, including infiltrating mom-and-pop e-commerce sites," said Tom Cuthbert, president and CEO of Austin, Texas-based Click Forensics, which publishes the quarterly Click Fraud Index. "As a result it's more important than ever before for advertisers, publishers, ad networks and search engines to cooperate and share data in order to stem what?s on target to be an even worse problem in 2008."

Findings for Q4 2007 include:

  • The click-fraud rate rose to 16.6 percent, up 14.2 percent year-over-year.

  • The click-fraud rate for content networks, such as Google AdSense and the Yahoo Publisher Network, grew to 28.3 percent for Q4 2007, up 19.2 percent year-over-year.

  • Click-fraud traffic from botnets was 15 percent higher than Q3 2007.


    • Business & E-Business




    This is a public forum. CMP Media and its affiliates are not responsible for and do not control what is posted herein. CMP Media makes no warranties or guarantees concerning any advice dispensed by its staff members or readers.

    Community standards in this comment area do not permit hate language, excessive profanity, or other patently offensive language. Please be aware that all information posted to this comment area becomes the property of CMP Media LLC and may be edited and republished in print or electronic format as outlined in CMP Media's Terms of Service.

    Important Note: This comment area is NOT intended for commercial messages or solicitations of business.




    Explore ANTenna Blog
    Most Recent Posts
    ANTenna Blog Topics
       
       
    ANTenna Bloggers
    ANTenna Blog Roll


     


    Browse by Category

    IW SMB Tech
    Term Of Day:

    Boost your tech
    vocabulary!
    InformationWeek SMB's
    TechEncyclopedia
    defines more than
    20,000 IT terms.



    FREE Technology Services Locator!

    Search our database of 200,000 solution- provider locations by business activity, technology, vertical market, and customer size. Find a technology partner NOW.

    go