Pay-Per-Click: Part 2

Click Fraud sounds like something that should never be allowed in stilettos, but the reality of the situation is that click fraud is an umbrella term for a myriad of shell games whose sole purpose is to artificially conjure up click rates in a bid to produce more voluptuous Internet marketing invoices for companies ranging from basement start-ups to mega corporations. Many in the industry consider click fraud to be the deadliest poison threatening the Internet’s fledgling advertising models, a threat that has the fantastic minds at Google and Yahoo! shaking with the question of how to put the issue in the dirt.

Let’s be very clear before we go any further on this issue – there are a kaleidoscope of customers who are pleased with the returns from their ads on legitimate search results on Yahoo! or Google. The bag of poison begins to seep though when these same productive and lucrative ads are recycled across the Internet and businesses that only conduct their affairs in North America or Europe suddenly end up getting billed for clicks from outfits in such capitalist heavyweights as Botswana, Mongolia, and Syria. Remember, there’s nothing on the books to say the clicks have to be relevant – a click is a click by any other name, and the bill is still due.

There are some in the Search Engine Optimization business that suggest that because Google and Yahoo! take a percentage of these ill-begotten revenue streams, and share the enterprise with a host of nefarious website hosts and operators, that Google and Yahoo! (and other smaller search engines) have an incentive to turn a blind eye – profits – as do smaller operators such as marketing networks. Voices from inside the Google campus are adamant that it is not in their best interests to squeeze the customer for erroneous clicks because what is really at stake here is the continuation of a young confidence. We’ve all heard the term consumer confidence on the news over the past six months or so – apparently it is a rattled, jaw-beaten prize fighter that’s hanging on for dear life, sweating it out for the bell – but in a free market economy, confidence is a prime mover and shaker of the weak willed. Think about it – you need a car, you want to help your neighbors, so you decide to buy domestic, but as you are heading out to the land of strip malls and endless car lots, you start to second-guess your choice. Suddenly you veer off the road, turning from philanthropist to sceptic – these guys need a bail out from the government because they can’t meet payroll, what kind of warranty is going to be honoured by a gaggle of bankrupt billionaires? You see quite clearly where confidence, or lack thereof, can very easily trump intention.