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Google Businesses The Internet Government The Courts News

Webhost Sues Google 233

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the go-fishing-for-deep-pockets dept.
TheOcho writes "Webhost company AIT has decided to file a class action lawsuit against the internet giant Google. According to the article the dispute is over click fraud. AIT claims they have lost around $500,000 due to fraudulent clicks. They claim that Google is hitting their website from 'the same IP addresses'."
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Webhost Sues Google More

Webhost Sues Google

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  • PR Stunt? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by ikejam ( 821818 )
    the whole expansion plans in TFA having nothing to do with the case as such....

    • Re:PR Stunt? (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Luke Psywalker ( 869266 )
      It stinks of it and the stench is increased when you notice the linked article displays a large ad for AIT.

    • Re:PR Stunt? (Score:4, Informative)

      by Melkman ( 82959 ) on Sunday December 11, 2005 @07:04AM (#14232517)
      And that they are a Microsoft showcase [microsoft.com] shouldn't have to do anything with it either.

    • the whole expansion plans in TFA having nothing to do with the case as such....

      Well, let's see. The site is Fayetteville (NC) Online.

      AIT is based in Fayetteville, NC. A quick glance at Wikipedia [wikipedia.org] tells me that Fayetteville isn't a huge city, other than being the home of Fort Bragg. So...maybe the fact that a hometown company is spreading into major markets across the country (Chicago, Atlanta, Los Angeles, Nashville, Raleigh and Charlotte) is something a bit notable that local residents might want to know

  • A news article with a press release cool (Score:5, Insightful)

    by portwojc ( 201398 ) on Sunday December 11, 2005 @06:35AM (#14232450) Homepage
    AIT stores

    AIT launched its first storefront Thursday in Chicago.

    The Fayetteville Web hosting company plans to open one or two stores each month in 2006 as part of a $5 million campaign to expand the company.


    Convenient both are occuring at the same time so it can be mentioned in the same article. Looks like a news story then turns into a press release.

    • That always happens though. News stories generally try to give a bit of background on the main subject of the story; in this case, it's AIT.

      Now that's not to say that AIT didn't time the suit to coincide with the expansion, of course, or that when asked for a little background on themselves, that they didn't emphasise their current plans...

  • I don't get it (Score:4, Interesting)

    by gnud ( 934243 ) on Sunday December 11, 2005 @06:35AM (#14232451)
    Isn't this their own fault if they neglect to add a rel=nofollow? Besides, the advertising agreement ought to exclude known crawler IPs like google,yahoo etc.
    • Can you explain to me, what's the exact connection between the rel=nofollow tag and AdWords click fraud?

  • The same IP / cookie-IP logs (Score:4, Interesting)

    by tronicum ( 617382 ) * on Sunday December 11, 2005 @06:37AM (#14232454)
    I must think about NAT and proxys if people tell me about IPs. Most of them don't know the difference between 127.0.0.1 and all the other crazy numbers that manage the internet and their LAN.

    But suddendly, if money is involed, all this suit wearing managers start to say stuff like somebody has to do something. It seems to be true that they have been tricked. Even that it is indeed a problem of Google.

    But only they can do a grep/sql statement on their little databases that stores all the cookie-ip-requests log data.

    • Yeah, but this company is an ISP. So I would expect that they know. In fact, if this was a real problem, I would expect that it would not have taken 5 years for them to figure it out. But they did not. This is akin to an accountant claiming that one guy has been charging him extra for 5 years by outrageous bookwork. Would not happen for 5 years.
    • Google Web Accelerator is a proxy, so one would only expect a number of same IP's from AdWords, since the same people that would use Google Web Accelerator are the same people that would click on an AdWords link, especially for an ISP.
    • There is an excellent analysis of the adwords clickfraud [ngedit.com] problem. A snippet from that page:

      Some guy in Hong Kong has set up several domains with song lyrics and other easily accessible content downloaded from other sites. As those guys are damn smart, they have figured a way to force a google cache access to their page into showing any adsense ad. I've been trying to do it myself, and haven't been able to, but the cache does show weird adsense results. Then, they have some kind of bot which accesses those

  • Summary is wrong... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by spacefight ( 577141 ) on Sunday December 11, 2005 @06:37AM (#14232455)
    ... again. The fraudulent clicks are not beeing made from a Google IP according to TFA:

    Briggs said AIT is able to see where each of its advertising clicks are coming from, and in-house reports showing clicks from the same IP addresses indicate they are fraudulent.
    Later on the guy seems not to see any IPs though:

    "My question to them is simple," Briggs said. "Don't you think you have a right to see which IP addresses you were charged for?"

    I'm sure with some serious tracking scripts any Adwords buyer should be able to monitor the IP addresses on a given keyword.

    • Re:Summary is wrong... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by aug24 ( 38229 ) on Sunday December 11, 2005 @06:56AM (#14232498) Homepage
      The summary is badly written, not wrong.

      They can see IP addresses for clicks in their server referrer urls and thus they know that many are frauds (see slashdot et al passim for more info on fraudulent clicks).

      Their complaint is effectively that google doesn't provide them with this info and so they have been asked to pay for X clicks when they would like to pay for Y distinct clicks.

      They really have no case. Imagine a guy being paid to hand out leaflets in the street... suppose some other guy keeps walking back and forth taking a leaflet - is that the fault of the leaflet guy?

      Justin.

      • Re:Summary is wrong... (Score:3, Insightful)

        by makomk ( 752139 )
        Imagine a guy being paid to hand out leaflets in the street... suppose some other guy keeps walking back and forth taking a leaflet - is that the fault of the leaflet guy?

        Yes. You'd expect him to notice after a few times that the person looked familiar, and figure out what's going on.

        • Re:Summary is wrong... (Score:3, Interesting)

          by aug24 ( 38229 )
          Riiiight. Obviously I need a better analogy for the hard of thinking.

          Suppose it's a ten different people who come round at hourly intervals. And the leaflet guy's also giving out ten different lots of leaflets for different companies, one at a time. And the contract you have with the leaftlet guy doesn't mention only giving leaflets out to each person once. And you didn't tell him in advance not to do it.

          Is he still wrong, or are you and the mods who declared you insightful smoking crack?

          Justin.
        • Alternatively, let's say you have a company that wants to read a white paper on Knowledge Management. People at the company read the white paper again and again, downloading it. It's a popular paper. Consider if this were a white paper each person must pay for, by the download, as their only realistic means of proving that someone read the paper.

          That to me sounds like what Google's policies for charging per click are, and it sounds to me like that's what we're dealing with here.

          An AOL ip address would indic

          • An AOL ip address would indicate that thousands of clickthroughs are happening, and given that AOL re-distributes the same IP addresses over and over again thousands of times in a week, I doubt this case will have much merit.

            That's one explanation, and the one I came up with immediately reading the article. But as of yet we don't see the detailed suit claims and list of IP addresses, so we don't know.

            Could be them being dumb and not noticing that there are large ISPs out there who proxy addresses like

      • Re:Summary is wrong... (Score:4, Insightful)

        by hugzz ( 712021 ) on Sunday December 11, 2005 @08:36AM (#14232685)
        Back in my day, if you didn't like the service that a company provided, you'd change to their competition, not sue.
      • When they get 1,000 clickthroughs from 1,000 different AOL users they only want to pay for one.
      • Google could really fark their daily by simpley saying" our records show that the entire IP-4 has clicked your add at least once so your ads for new customers would be shown until IP-6 come on-line."

        Imagine a guy being paid to hand out leaflets in the street... suppose some other guy keeps walking back and forth taking a leaflet - is that the fault of the leaflet guy?
        As likely it's a guy wearing a gorrila suit, the leaflet distributor knows that different people change into and out of the suit on a regula
    • Maybe the view's a little paranoid, but with business a little paranoia is a good thing. Several times I've seen it suggested that a competitor might hire some cheap labor to click on their competition's ads, to cause them to get charged more for their advertisement. I wonder has this company even explored this option? It doesn't sound like they have made any connection between Google and the clicks, and are just aiming for what to them appears to be the most obvious source, without any evidence whatsoev

  • Right off the bat... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Cherita Chen ( 936355 ) on Sunday December 11, 2005 @06:44AM (#14232471) Homepage
    I can already see a major problem that AIT will have in actually winning this case. What about traffic that has been proxied? At one point or another, most network/systems administrators, when reviewing their log files, have wondered why they are seeing so much traffic from the same IP address located in "Reston, VA". This is of course the location of America Online's proxy servers.

    Is it just me, or does their case seem a little weak?

    For more info on the AOL proxy phenomenon http://webmaster.info.aol.com/proxyinfo.html [aol.com]

    • Re:Right off the bat... (Score:4, Funny)

      by amling ( 732942 ) <keith.amling@NOSpAm.gmail.com> on Sunday December 11, 2005 @07:47AM (#14232595)
      It is of course also the origin of the Reston strain of the Ebola virus. Coincidence? You decide.

    • Re:Right off the bat... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by jander ( 88775 ) on Sunday December 11, 2005 @03:58PM (#14234453) Homepage
      A weak case has never stopped Clarence Briggs before. If you look up "Litigious Bastard" in the dictionary, you will find his name.

      I used to work for this Asshole when it was first started, and when I quit, I was served with an injunction preventing me to go to work for my new employer, two days after christmas. It didn't matter that NC is a right to work state, and that the company I was going to work for was a consulting company that had NOTHING to do with web hosting - He was just pissed that I had the audacity to leave my low-pay, high stress job for something better. And, from my observations while working there and from what I have heard from people afterwards; unless you leave the company on his terms and with his blessings, you can expect to get sued. BTW - even though the injunction was immediately thrown out when it was heard by a judge, It ended up costing me about 10 grand in lost pay, and legal fees

      Which was why, I assume, one of the first things he did when he went "corporate" was NOT to pay the people who got him that far any better, but instead directly hire a lawyer to his staff...

      It's my opinion that Clarence Briggs is the Darl McBride of the Web Hosting industry - in fact, when the whole SCO vs IBM litigation was started, I almost had to wonder if Darl wasn't being advised by CB.

      To tie this into the parent - It wouldn't occur to them that a large majority might be from proxies... You would have to be experienced enough/smart enough to infer this, And most people that I know who meet these requirements are also smart enough to stay away from AIT. Besides, when has the facts ever been relevant to people like Briggs and McBride

      I won't go into how his entire web hosting business is built off of free software...

      I wouldn't be suprised if he tried suing me again, just for posting this, - and yes, he has/had little butt warts who's only job (as far as I knew) was to google his name/troll newsgroups for bad press about him or AIT, then spread FUD/Sue/or attempt to discredit the poster.)


      btw, this is all my opinion and protected by the first amendment, so FOAD Briggs

      • Re:Right off the bat... (Score:5, Interesting)

        by ruhk ( 70494 ) on Sunday December 11, 2005 @10:40PM (#14236117)
        Fuck me dead. Let me lend Jander some backup here. I was the NT admin at AIT when the stuff with Jander went down. It was ridiculous. Not long after, Clarence had me giving him access to people's Exchange accounts and breaking into their PCs so he could get at their files on the grounds they might "betray" him. That's the word Clarence used. Clarence went so far as to show up at one guy's (Ray, it was) WITH A SHERRIFF and demand access to the guy's home computer.

        The final straw for me was when he wanted every one of the *nix and NT administrators to provide financial disclosures not only on themselves, but their immediate family members as well. I got off relatively easily: I only had to pay clarence about $5300 to keep him off my back. A guy who left after me MOVED TO BAHRAIN to get away from Clarence.

        FOAD Briggs, indeed.

        Anyway, Jander, how things are going better for you and your family.

  • They do have a point (Score:5, Insightful)

    by u2boy_nl ( 927513 ) on Sunday December 11, 2005 @06:48AM (#14232479) Homepage
    "My question to them is simple," Briggs said. "Don't you think you have a right to see which IP addresses you were charged for?"

    Well they do have a point.
    Google has this data, why not make it available?

    If i were an advertiser I would want to be able to to verify that the bills Google sends me are indeed correct. Right now it seems that advertisers have no way of doing that?

    But I can see why Google is reluctant, providing this data incurs more costs, and I can imagine that there will be a lot of advertisers who are going to argue with them about their bills.

    • Re:They do have a point (Score:3, Insightful)

      by 1u3hr ( 530656 )
      Well they do have a point. Google has this data, why not make it available?

      Perhaps because this would violate the privacy of the people clickng on the ads, Google probably would have to highlight that it was doing that in its privacy policy. Also, there are possible security implications. Imagine you buy adwords for antivirus or firewalls; you get the IPs of interested customers and immediately target them for a portscan, having a good chance they aren't secure. And lots of other honeypot ideas involving

    • re: "But I can see why Google is reluctant, providing this data incurs more costs, and I can imagine that there will be a lot of advertisers who are going to argue with them about their bills."

      ok, they could pay someone to write a web panel that would provide access to the ad account's logs. that would take anyone competent -at most, if someone came on to do it with no background information and no documentation- like a week.

    • Re:They do have a point (Score:5, Interesting)

      by XorNand ( 517466 ) * on Sunday December 11, 2005 @12:40PM (#14233445)
      Why can't they track the referrals themselves? When creating Adwords, you input two URLs: one that's show in the bottom of the ad, and one that the clicker is actually sent to. You set the first parameter to http://www.fuzzybritchesbandit.com/ [fuzzybritchesbandit.com] and the second to http://www.fuzzybritchesbandit.com?campaign=adword s [fuzzybritchesbandit.com]. You then compare your HTTP logs against Google's clickthrough reports.

      This would ensure that you aren't getting charged for clicks where there are none. But there's also the possiblity that some sort of script *is* clicking just to drive your bill up. Now if this company has paid Google a half million dollars, they should have some pretty substantinal visitor data to mine. They should know what the typical visitor does once they arrive, e.g. the mean time spent on the site is 8.5 minutes, they're 76% likely to click on the features page first and then page second. Sooo... If they getting a bunch of clickthroughs from the same IP and the path/time through the site for each session is either a) identicial to the other sessions from that IP (a stupid bot that takes the same path everytime) or b) dramatically varies from the metrics of typical visitor (a semi-stupid bot that randomly traverses the site), then you know something is bunk.

      Like others have said, just saying "we have a lot of people from the same IP address" isn't good enough to pursue a claim of fraud. You'd think a webhost with a half-million dollar advertising budget would have the technicial staff who could tell them the same thing.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 )
      Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • Since when is an IP address considered sensitive personal information? It's ridiculous when you consider that the user clicks on the AdWords link, which Google records along with the IP address. The user is then redirected to the destination website which can then record the IP address as well. The destination website can even determine that the request from IP 12.34.56.78 actually came from an AdWords click. Google's just not sharing which clicks it billed for correspond to which IP addresses (which bo

  • Hyperlinks are Hyperlinks (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Scoria ( 264473 ) <`slashmail' `at' `initialized.org'> on Sunday December 11, 2005 @06:52AM (#14232484) Homepage
    Not surprisingly, the article is light on technical details. I don't believe that a corporation such as Google would seemingly overlook a simple address filter containing IP ranges used by known legitimate crawling agents.

    Maybe spam agents were indexing the AIT Web sites in an effort to aggregate data like published e-mail addresses. The article just doesn't tell us much. If that were the case, however, Google wouldn't have many options. They could add end-user validation to each advertisement (i.e., "Repeat the alphanumeric string so that we know you aren't a robot!"), which would obviously inconvenience the user and ultimately decrease traffic, or they could create ban filters. I would suppose that the latter option might also garner various legal accusations.

    It sounds as though AIT could have incurred a legitimate loss, but are pursuing a large corporation whose employees aren't exactly known by most people for their negligent behavior. If my suspicions are true, however, how could Google engineers manage to prevent "click fraud" while balancing the usability of their service? Nobody wants to spend thirty seconds validating themselves as a human to an advertisement. Maybe AIT would have better luck pursuing the (hypothetical) spammers.

  • /. Owes me at least $500,000 (Score:5, Funny)

    by Quirk ( 36086 ) on Sunday December 11, 2005 @06:55AM (#14232492) Homepage Journal
    I've been clicking the refresh button @ /. since the late 90s.

    Gee at maybe ~100 clicks/day for ~7 years I must have driven advertising revenue for the site to the tune of at least $500,000... I mean, even before the site had ads my obsessive compulsive hourly refresh rate drove the popularity of the site to where the guys made an OK buck the first time it sold.

    So consider this post my invoice in the sum of $500,000. I'll take it out in credit at Think Geek, but not in subscription dollars... or, just knock off the dupes, hell, knock of the dupes and I'll subcribe.:)

    • Re:/. Owes me at least $500,000 (Score:5, Insightful)

      by DrXym ( 126579 ) on Sunday December 11, 2005 @12:38PM (#14233439)
      I've been clicking the refresh button @ /. since the late 90s.

      With google, you pay when someone clicks on your link rather than how often the ad appears. You name your price for how much you'll pay for each click and that governs where and how often your ad appears. Obviously the more you'll pay for your keywords, the more Google will show it and the more impressions it will make. A part of that price you pay goes to the site that hosts it. Therefore I can reward a host site simply by clicking on their ads. I suppose in a way this classifies as "click fraud" since I rarely have the intention of buying whatever is being sold.

      Another bonus (or detriment depending on your POV) of pay-per-click is that you can "punish" advertisers that you don't like. A real-life example is the word "evolution". Fundamentalist religious outfits have paid for that word and consequently you see their ads all over biology and scientific sites that mention it. I click on the links since the concept of religious crazies paying scientists is deliciously ironic. This too could classify as "click fraud".

      Until the day that Google installs mind probes in every human being, it seems unlikely that they can do anything about either of these common situations. As long as such "click fraud" is essentially random and indistinguishable from background noise there is nothing they could do to stop it. Nothing at all.

      • Actually it is more insidious than that.

        Google 'india job clicking ads' [google.com] and you get over half a million hits, a great many of them describing in detail a digital evolution of the sweatshops from the turn of the last century, but instead of making clothing they are sitting there clicking on Google ads. A whole army of clickers, their only job being to drive click-through ad revenue for web-sites made specifically to drive this revenue.

        Sure would suck to be some company in the US (such as AIT) that made a go

  • Well this is interesting... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by tsm_sf ( 545316 ) * on Sunday December 11, 2005 @07:01AM (#14232513) Journal
    Quote from TFA:

    "It's wrong, and stealing and lying are wrong," AIT President Clarence Briggs said. "Somebody needs to do something about it."

    And a quick search finds this page: http://advocate.soundtrax.net/ait-suit.asp [soundtrax.net], a class action against AIT for, and I double-quote, "Stealing People's Money".

    Hmm!

    Here [marketwire.com] is a press release from AIT. My favorite bit?

    "The real threat here is to the concept of paid search and ultimately to the entire Internet," said Briggs. "If people lose confidence in the commercial viability of the Internet it threatens the very idea of an emerging global, digital economy. Sooner or later, if something isn't done, the second Internet bubble will burst."

    You say "internet bubble-burst", I hear "cheap Ducatis and Aeron chairs on craigslist".

  • Something like this happened to me once (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Giometrix ( 932993 ) on Sunday December 11, 2005 @07:03AM (#14232515) Homepage

    ...Albiet on a much, much smaller scale. A bot (seemingly) made a huge amount of click-throughs within an hour (whether this was malicious or not, I have no clue), about 100x more click-throughs than normal. When I pointed this out to Google's customer support, I was shot back an email which in effect said, "We have safe-guards in place, those clicks are real." I was pretty bummed that the "do no evil" company would fire off an email like that, without at least investigating. Luckily, when I requested that they take a closer look, and that they compare what happened within that hour with my normal traffic, they agreed to investigate. In the end, I was never charged.

    Google DID the right thing for me; but I really was at the mercy of Google. I really can't see why a paying customer shouldn't be seeing exactly what he's being charged for.

    • Oh man can you imagine if they did it like your phone bill, itemizing every "call". That would suck.

      Maybe having the info available online would be better. ;-)

    • Yeah, I've had bad luck with some things that Google tells you for advertising, too. For example, when you sign up for the ads, you what keywords you want to advertise in relation to, and they tell you based on your keywords what position you can expect (i.e. on the 3rd page, or the 10th page, or whatever when you search for those keywords), and about how much they estimate the cost.

      The thing is, once we signed up for some ad words, and we were told we'd be on the 2nd page. Well, doing about 100 searches

  • Issues of scale (Score:3, Insightful)

    by gringer ( 252588 ) on Sunday December 11, 2005 @07:15AM (#14232531)
    Okay, $500,000 is a lot of money to me, but is it all that much to Google? Given that this is meant to be a class-action lawsuit against Google, I would expect a value a bit higher than this. I figure that if there's even a whiff of AIT being correct, a simple "settle out of court for a little less" might be an option here.

    Perhaps the case just doesn't seem big enough to have the class-action label stuck to it...
    • except it is 500,000 dollars for just them. a class action status suti just means you can have multiple plaintiffs and they all get settled at one time. imagine 10,000 of these suits aggregated together and suddenly you see hundreds of millions could be lost here. of course, this is just the beginning, and this stuff takes years before payment is ever made.

  • A single IP address doesn't mean one person (Score:4, Interesting)

    by DrXym ( 126579 ) on Sunday December 11, 2005 @07:17AM (#14232532)
    If someone were malicious enough they could nibble away at a site by using a large proxy, clear their cookies each time, use different useragents, and do just enough clicks that it wouldn't necessarily stand out against the background noise. Google couldn't do a thing to stop them and it would be stupid to expect them to. Perhaps Google could implement some kind of time sensitive automated IP blacklist based on certain thresholds but it's hard to see what else they could do.

    If these guys have the single IP in their logs, perhaps they be looking to see who it is and sue them instead of google.

  • Waste of Taxpayers' Money... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Chaffar ( 670874 ) on Sunday December 11, 2005 @07:19AM (#14232538)
    Probability that this is a waste of taxpayer's money:

    - The page has a a commercial for AIT Inc.'s "Voice, Training, and Data Services for the Office: + 20%.

    - The article about AIT suing Google is immediately followed by another one promoting AIT new storefront launch in Chicago. + 35%

    - Firefox says that 2 Pop-ups were blocked. I shudder to think of the content of these pop-ups: + 15 %.

    -"It's wrong, and stealing and lying are wrong," AIT President Clarence Briggs said. "Somebody needs to do something about it." OMG Somebody think of the children! : + 20 %.

    - The article is carried by The Fayetteville (NC) Observer. Any search on Google for AIT, Google, and lawsuit yield nothing: + 40%.

    - Interestingly, though, searching for the same keywords on Yahoo does yield a few hits. : - 10 %.

    Yep, this is definitely a publicity stunt by a random company trying to capitalize on Google's high profile. The numbers don't lie :)

  • Google or a competitor clicking? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by erroneus ( 253617 ) on Sunday December 11, 2005 @07:33AM (#14232564) Homepage
    I've heard of competitors attempting to harm another by deploying some method of abuse against their advertising costs. This would not be dissimilar to exploiting a 1-800 phone number by attempting to inflict cost damages against the target.

    The article doesn't indicate any belief that Google is directly responsible for the abuse they believe is occuring though it doesn't indicate that it believes otherwise either. However, I did not read where the possibility that competitors or other malicious parties are directly responsible for the act.

    If they believe that Google should be responsible for not preventing an act, then I think it's a case that should be judged on whether or not Google should be responsible for filtering fraudulent calls to their site as channeled through Google advertising. To make the parallel to toll-free phone service once more, I am unfamiliar with any such protection offered by a phone service provider.

    Should Google do their best to determine and filter against abusive "clicking"? Yes, if they want their advertising to be valued. Are they or have they been doing their best? That is a question for the courts to decide I suppose. But in my view, unless Google is being directly charged with responsibility for performing these clicks, then I think it will be a tough case to prove.

  • Problems with adwords (Score:5, Informative)

    by pieterh ( 196118 ) on Sunday December 11, 2005 @07:47AM (#14232594) Homepage
    When Google invoices you for clicks, a share of this money is going to sites that are showing the ads. There are sites that fraudulently drive clicks in order to get more money.

    When my firm used adwords, we saw our monthly fees from Google climbing steadily, from $10-20 per month to over $1000, but with no matching increase in traffic, and almost zero contacts via our web site (which was clearly aimed only at Belgian customers). We estimated that 95% of the clicks were fraudulent. We had no way of checking who was clicking on our site. So we cancelled the program and focussed on more traditional sales.

    This is, IMO, one of the major skeletons lurking in Google's cupboard.

    • Marketing is a tool designed to increase the overall level of visibility of a given product or service. When executed correctly ,this increase sharply rises from baseline (A), then falls off its peak slightly to plataeu at a higher level (B). Ongoing investment in this marketing channel is required to sustain visibility at B. The ROI of this investment is easy to calculate: Does net revenue of said product or service (B - A) exceed the cost of this marketing channel?

      Getting to C will require further analysi
    • Were you limiting you adwords campaign to just Google search, or were you including content websites? It's easy to limit the adwords campaign so that there is no modivation for click fraud.

  • My experience (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 11, 2005 @08:02AM (#14232620)
    I recently had a problem with Google as well. As an owner of a (very) small business, I had been running a small, focused ad campaign using Google's AdWords. One day while browsing through the daily charges on my AdWords account, I noticed a dramatic spike for just one day. Looking deeper, the spike consisted of clicks on just one of my target keywords.

    I looked at my website's logs for that day and found over 50 instances of a request for "HEAD / HTTP/1.0" from a single IP address. What made this even more suspicious was the fact that they were all made with "Wget/1.10", and that IP never requested any other page from my site, not even the image/CSS files used on the main page.

    I contacted Google's AdWord support, documenting all of the above in great detail and saying that these seem like fraudulent clicks. I got back a canned response "We're looking into it". Two weeks go by, nothing happens. I contact them again, asking for a progress update. I get back a response "Your case will be investigated within the next week". I wait 1.5 weeks, contact them again, ask what the hell is taking them so long.

    I get back another response, again promising swift resolution. Couple of days later, I get an email from an Indian employee of Google saying that they have not detected any fraudulent clicks. I ask for a breakdown of charges per IP address for the day to check their data, but they say they can not provide those.

    I tell them very well, I have no choice but to shut down all of my Google advertising.

    Personally, I wouldn't trust Google's AdWords at all. I'm sure it makes money for some advertisers, but expecting Google to side on the side of advertisers in disputes is overoptimistic. They lose money on that, and as the case is that all the evidence is in their possession, and they refuse to show it to outsiders, how the hell are you supposed to prove that clicks are fraudulent if Google disagrees with you, as they seem to do in even obvious cases?

    • Re:My experience (Score:2, Flamebait)

      by bayankaran ( 446245 )
      Couple of days later, I get an email from an Indian employee of Google saying that they have not detected any fraudulent clicks.

      QUESTIONS:

      How did you find out the email you got was from an Indian?

      Is it from the name of the employee?

      If the reply was from a non-Indian, would you be satisfied with the answer?

      Can you give us proof the "spike" you are mentioning?
  • Briggs said AIT is able to see where each of its advertising clicks are coming from, and in-house reports showing clicks from the same IP addresses indicate they are fraudulent.

    So either, some meanie out there was clicking the link over and over, in which that person is responsible. Or else, perhaps the IP is one of Google's, as somehow Google sends the person who clicked over to the website?

  • Silly contracts (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Flyboy Connor ( 741764 ) on Sunday December 11, 2005 @08:46AM (#14232710)
    These adclick contracts definitely sound silly. You would be a fool to place an ad that way.

    "I will pay Google 1 cent for every click on my ad. Regardless the number of clicks."

    If it were me, I would always have a maximum in place, and a method of verifying the correctness of a bill.

    Besides, do Internet ads really work?

    • Re:Silly contracts (Score:3, Informative)

      by kuzb ( 724081 )
      Yes. The reason I can say this, is that I work for a corporation as a developer where part of what we do is selling ads. Not only do they work, they are highly lucrative. Lets just say in less than a month, the system makes way more than enough to pay my wage for a year.

      A lot of people think internet advertising is dead, but look at how much is still around. Do you really think there would be so many ads on so many sites if it wasn't making money?

      • Yes. The reason I can say this, is that I work for a corporation as a developer where part of what we do is selling ads. Not only do they work, they are highly lucrative.


        Yes, they do make money for the seller of the ads like Google. But I think the OP was asking
        more about whether they work for the buyer.
  • AIT is already pretty sleazy. Although not directly related to this adwords issue, on their 50 dollar a month dedicated server hosting, they give you 1000 gigs of transfer per month. In the fine print is a 40 cent per megabyte of overage cost. This is 10 times what all of the other discount hosting providers charge like servermatrix or serverbeach. Going over by a few hundred gigs which they original only charged 50 bucks for, nets tens of thousands of dollars in overages according to their scale.
  • I run a special interest automotive portal that gets quite a lot of traffic and has a fairly tight community. About 18 months ago, we decided, instead of asking our users for cash donations to pay for bandwidth, we'd try to sign up with Google. Shortly after doing so, we announced to our community that we were going to rely on ad revenue to pay for the bandwidth; and to do us a favor by turning off any ad-blocking mechanisms they had, for our site. Well, one of our well-meaning but none-too-bright users d
    • Sounds like Google's Ad-Words operation suffers from "Paypal Syndrome". You know, the "Gee it's a nice service but God help you if anything goes wrong because nobody else will." I guess quality customer service is one of those expenses that isn't covered by the do-no-evil mantra we hear so much about. At least, that's what I'm gathering from the various Slashdot posts I'm seeing on this subject.
    • we announced to our community that we were going to rely on ad revenue to pay for the bandwidth; and to do us a favor by turning off any ad-blocking mechanisms they had, for our site
      Well, that really does sound to me like inviting your users to click on the ads, which is against the terms of the contract, so no surprise really.
  • Seems to me that advertising more often than not takes unknowns into consideration. What it really comes down to is whether or not the advertising expense has a profitable return.

    You place a bad ad and get no return than who's fault is it? Your for either creating a poor ad and/or placing it in teh wrong location... etc..

    But does that advertising/account department of say some newspaper give the advertiser the list of subscribers to the newspaper?

    equating internet advertising with phone bills is perhaps not

  • AIT are Bloodsucking Scammers (Score:4, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 11, 2005 @10:35AM (#14232958)
    I used AIT for a while a couple of years ago.

    THEY.ARE.SCUM.

    They billing practices are blatantly fraudulent, sometimes charging you ridiculous "bandwidth charges" that exceed hundreds of dollars a month. Calls to billing never get answered, and neither is there an obvious way for one to close his/her account.

    It took me over three months to have my account closed. My total on-hold time over those three months was over 8 hours. I left atleast 20 messages, out of which three got answered. I would call and leave messages, and eventually after a couple of days someone would call me back and give me a bunch of instructions on how to close my account (visit some obscure page, print document, sign, fax etc.), and then... nothing. I'd call back and after trying for days to get through to someone, they'd say they never received it, and I'd have to do it all over again.

    Sometimes they would say they received it, and the account would be closed; and the next month, my credit-card would be billed again.

    They have promised me to repay my money back, and I've seen nothing in over three years.

    Not to my surprise, other people have been through similar situations with this provider, and some of their stories are pretty terrible. Read all about it here:

    http://autsucks.com/ [autsucks.com]

    They even have ex-employees there talking about how bad they were treated.

    • Not to underrate AIT's scumminess, but did you try to get the charges reversed through your credit card company, and upon 2nd fraudulent billing, get that merhcant blocked on your card? The better credit card companies will clear these things up. They may need your request in writing, but this can be done. I know, because I've done it before (not with AIT since I've never done business with them).

      And FYI, your link is broken. Shouldn't it be http://aitsucks.com/ [aitsucks.com]? You're supposed to check you links on

  • http://www.aitsucks.com/ [aitsucks.com] - I say no more..

  • AIT .... sounds familiar (Score:5, Informative)

    by CrazyJ020 ( 219799 ) on Sunday December 11, 2005 @10:54AM (#14233028) Homepage
    AIT is very very bad. I colocated in their datacenter for about a year, paying $100/month for a verbal agreement of 100 GB bandwidth. There was absolutely no paper record of the 100 GB limit and not verbal record of what charges would apply if I went over. My paper contract with them had explicity voided out the section regarding charges for excessive bandwidth.

    One month I received a bill for $6000 citing "excessive" bandwidth. I had used approximately 200 GB of bandwidth, about double my allotted. I called and they assured me it would be fixed. Then the next months bill was $10,000. Their billing system continued to try to draft my credit card.

    I finally had to take them to court over the disputed charges. They "waived" the $16,000 right before we entered the courtroom. The eventual settlement came to around $600. These guys are crooks.

    http://www.webhostingratings.com/plans/AIT-Reviews .html [webhostingratings.com]

    "AIT is flat out terrible and possibly the worst service out there."

    "I have horror stories about AIT on which I could dwell for hours, but let's just say that AIT's attitude no matter what happens is "punish the customer." They feel free to mess with your stuff whenever they feel like it, change your deal on a whim, and generally suck! Big-time weasels! We are planning a big crew party for after we blow them up; we'll call it "Operation AIT Freedom!"

    "When I moved, AIT continued to bill me for "service" on an account that was closed. When I wouldn't pay, they ruined my credit. I could not even talk to credit manager about it. Bad guys!"

    ""Based on BBB files, this company has an unsatisfactory record with the Bureau due to one or more unanswered complaints.""

    "They've stolen $900 from me by disk over-usage and fraudulent billing practices."

    "AIT systematically stole money from us for months."

    These are all from different customers. This company has consistently and systematically screwed their customers.

    • Re:AIT .... sounds familiar (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      I can second that.

      Many years ago I had a basic $20 hosting account with them that, for whatever reason, I simply wasn't using any more and wanted to cancel. So like any normal person I emailed them, telling them to cancel my account - they responded that I would need to fax some identifying information. I did what was asked and days later I noticed the account had not been cancelled. I called them and of course they claimed the fax was never received...you can see where this is going...

      To make a long story

    • Re:AIT .... sounds familiar (Score:4, Informative)

      by bill_mcgonigle ( 4333 ) * on Sunday December 11, 2005 @03:45PM (#14234412) Homepage Journal
      You might as well just link to the fan site [aitsucks.com].

      A friend of mine just had trouble with them when apparently they sent hundreds of domain deletion requests to the .org registrar and made the customers pay for reinstatement, after dodging the issue for almost a week (of downtime for their customers).

      I had never heard of them previously.

  • Some Notes (Score:4, Informative)

    by ironwill96 ( 736883 ) on Sunday December 11, 2005 @11:03AM (#14233078) Homepage Journal
    I live in Fayetteville and have dealt with AIT for hosting stuff ever since they came into existence. The business was started by a ex-soldier (Clarence Briggs) and is now one of the world's largest web hosts as far as number of domains hosted. They are not just some "random" company as other people have said.

    However, the point that the article linked is in our local newspapers online site is valid. Also, probably the reason that it talks about AIT's plans for expansion into storefronts is because Fayetteville has a vested interest in what is going on with AIT as they provide good high-tech, high-paying jobs for our area. People reading the newspaper (which the online article is a clone of what was in our newspaper), want to know what is going on with that company (which is smack in the middle of our attempt to revitalize our downtown area).

    Another interesting tidbit is that AIT is also suing the newspaper (that was linked in the /. article) as of last week over advertising fraud. They claim that the newspaper is advertising a lot higher # of unique visitors to their wesbite than what they actually receive (they are hosted with AIT). It's interesting in that to me it seems AIT is revealing private information about a website they are hosting (not for much longer I bet!).

    So, basically, you all are getting a look into my town's petty politicking by one of the largest companies that is based out of here. Enjoy.

    • Re:Some corrections (Score:2, Interesting)

      by thaylin ( 555395 )
      Good high paying jobs? I worked there as an admin. On adverage the average admin salery was 28k

      The average tech pay was around 22k

      They raise their "average" pay per employee by giving raises to the officers

      As for number of domains hosted, they do not meet the number listed, just like in the early days they did not have an actual "OC-192", they just had the equivilant over multiple pipes.

      You have to watch out for posts like this, at AITsucks.com the press boys at AIT like to come and anonymously
      • I don't work for AIT, I work for a large local jewelry store. And yes, AIT support is horrible. One thing that impressed me though is that when I e-mailed the President of the company, he responded within one hour and sent someone out (since we are local) to resolve our issue. However, we have a long history of not having our phone calls returned from support or ever reaching a real person - so I can feel the pain. I've tried to convince my boss to switch web hosts, but he is too lazy.

        If I worked for

  • AIT Sucks (Score:2, Informative)

    by nodnarb1978 ( 725530 )
    AIT suing Google for fraud is like the pot calling the kettle black. For a few years now, there's been a website run by a former AIT reseller that delves into the dark truth behind this McWebhost. AIT CEO Briggs is revealed to be a boastful drunkard who abuses his support staff, and AIT's infrastructure is revealed to be mostly obsolete, poor translations of better open source and proprietary packages. The full story can be found at AITSucks.com [aitsucks.com], I recommend budgeting quite a bit of time, get a cup of co

  • AIT's reputation (Score:3, Informative)

    by TimeSpeak ( 873865 ) on Sunday December 11, 2005 @03:30PM (#14234341) Journal
    Well considering AIT's bad reputation with web savvy people all over the country, I could see angry customers purposely clicking the pay-per-click link over the free link every time they search for "web hosting".
    Also how do they treat their own employees? Their consistent 'evil doing' is coming back to kick themselves in the asses. They will not win this case. They likely just ruined what little chance they had of gaining new customers, unaware of their greedy unethicalness.
  • I had to RTFA to find out that AIT claims it lost "$500K in revenues" -- which pretty much means it is assuming some comparison between its alleged fake clicks to either a % conversion rate of real clicks or assuming that all of the clicks would have resulted in sales.

    Its not much of a basis for a lawsuit. The damages should be based on costs incurred to deal with fake clicks, because legitimate sales/clicks weren't blocked.
  • "It's wrong, and stealing and lying are wrong," AIT President Clarence Briggs said. "Somebody needs to do something about it."

    Has he borrowed one of GWB's speachwriter as a publicist?

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