Clicking Riches
The recent press and lawsuits concerning the rise in fraudulent “clicks” generated by both advertisers and competitors in order to drive up prices and drive out competition should sound warning signals to any devotee of this new trend. It seems that in some cases, up to half of all “clicks” from purchased online advertisements have been fraudulently produced. The system is easy to manipulate, after all. The way it works is two-fold: either you pay as the advertisers have for Million Dollar Homepage space – as a one off fee or as a monthly installment, regardless of the number of people who visit your website, or you pay by the number of visits generated to your websites as a result of your advertisements, such as with Google’s Adwords. The problem with the former is that there is nothing to stop the provider of the advertising space to keep ‘clicking’ on an advertiser’s link to make it look as if they are receiving more interest than they actually are, and thus giving them incentive to keep advertising with you. The problem with the pay-by-click method is that competitors can easily keep “clicking” your ads, driving up advertising revenues, and significantly cutting into a firm’s marketing costs; indeed, this has been the case with a number of advertisers already.
To put a hypothesis to the test, I purchased some space on copycat Million Dollar homepage sites for my site, “The Global Perspective.” The result so far has been predictable but worrying for those hoping to translate advertising dollars to pocketed dollars – a large increase in website hits, but no net change in the variables that count. As far as this weblog goes, “comments” and "trackbacks" on posts are the revenue streams, and while the hit rate has soared four times on the first day, there has been no increase in the number of comments or substantial increase in the number of viewers viewing anything other than the front page (i.e. not looking at past posts). This behaviour is in stark contrast to visitors from other sources (such as other blogs). If visitors are not willing to trawl through and contribute to a free forum, this hardly bodes well for those who are hoping to sell goods. Add to this that while there was a reasonable rise in hits in the first few weeks of advertising, the links have fallen off and generated a meager three hits a week now.
Article comments
1 - DE
I have seen a rising number of click fraud cases from overseas.They are smarter then us at hacking into Google and redirecting the money to their accounts.The money from ads has definately gone down due the number of people trying to cheat the system.
2 - Norm Yerke
Daniel, it's interesting, I found your blog somewhere? I wrote regarding the writings on partial birth abortions.
Now I want to tell you about the latest pixel advertising venue www.pixelblogsoftheworld.com. Try it and let me know how it works for you. Thanks much, Norm
3 - David Anderson
Daniel.
Here is another self-serving comment on the million pixel ad trend. My Shop-a-Rama Family has created a series of one million pixel T-shirt pages which we hope add something credible to the concept. All our content is on a single theme and all the advertisers come from within the Cafepress shopkeeper comunity. There is a touch of guidance for the potential t-shirt purchaser and a bit of interactivity comparable to a rack of t-shirts or a box of old LPs. In the end each page will have just over 1,000,000 pixels worth of T Shirt design images.
It would be great to hear what others more steeped in the advert biz think of our take on the current trend. Enjoyed this blog entry.
4 - Manish Vij
Great Article...Can anybody help me out with points to be kept in mind, to prevent click fraud to maximum, while developing a click based advertising network.
Thanks
Manish
5 - Rob
You've got a really good point, I've often wondered what many companies were really thinking with buying all this adspace, who really clicks ads anyway? Most people like getting things for free. I'm thinking once this huge ad craze is over the internet is going to get a lot more pricey to surf.
6 - Brian
I think alot of times it is not that people "do not click thru ads" people click through ANYTHING that atttracts thier attention. If it is an ad they will click if it is a link to more information they will click. It really depends on WHAT the person is looking for at the time and it all becomes a numbers game. As the internet swells from millions of pages to Billions and then TRILLIONS of pages each individual page is going to have less of an impact and as the EYEBALLS also increase then each page has more of an impact just on a smaller group of people. I think it will all be about NICHE marketing. The person who CORNERS a a NICHE will do well more and more people will feel less inclined to "SURF" and will just stay in thier own safe zone. They will only click on TRUSTED sites and more importantly only click out of those trusted sites to other sites that become trusted because of the first site. I think GOOGLE is going to have to police itself better or it will no longer be a trusted site.
7 - Nancy
My question is, why do advertisers kid themselves that ANYBODY in their right mind is going to click on their ads? Most people - like me - loathe ads in any form and avoid them like the plague. They certainly don't seek them out. Which leads to another gripe: why do advertisers think that obnoxious pop-ups & flashing 'blinkers' are going to sell their crap? I can bottom line guarantee that such tactics are only going to ensure that I DON'T spend a nickel on your goddamned junk or whatever you're peddling. Alienating potential customers by in-their-face ads is NOT a good way to get business. Only someone with a screw loose thinks it will. Personally, I think all advertisers should fry in hell.