Originally published February 16 2006
Click fraud threatens lucrative online business
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
Wired Magazine features an article on click fraud, which threatens to undermine the pay-per-click online advertising industry.
To reach this audience with traditional advertising, he would have had to buy time on scores of television and radio stations and space in just as many newspapers and magazines, something that only wealthy, established companies could afford.
Even if Cauff could pay for the ads, the vast majority of people exposed to them wouldn't care about charter jets, so most of his money would be wasted.
As other charter-air companies began PPC advertising, the cost of a click on a top-ranked ad rose to about $10 - in some cases as high as $30 - and there could be hundreds of clicks a month.
Which is why Cauff was infuriated when he discovered that up to "40 percent, maybe more" of the clicks on his keyword ads apparently came not from potential customers around the nation but from a single Internet address, one that belonged to a rival based in New York City.
(The most familiar form is Google's AdSense program - the sets of links labeled ads by goooooogle that show up on pages across the Internet. The advertisements that appear on Google itself are part of a separate but related program called AdWords.)
If a blog visitor clicks on the ad, the search engine splits its fee with the blogger.
Although these "affiliate" ads have been hugely successful for advertisers, search engines, and the host Web sites, the system creates an incentive for affiliates to cheat.
All of which is to say that little blue text links, a type of advertising that barely existed five years ago, are poised to become the single most important form of marketing in the US - unless click fraud ruins it.
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