Spyware Still Cheating Merchants 82
Jamie found an interesting story about how Spyware is still on the move. It talks about how Spyware vendors are trying to clean up their image, but still doing fishy things. It breaks down several common types of spyware and some analysis of each.
Ben Edelman, here (Score:5, Interesting)
It would be particularly interesting to hear from merchants and by legit (non-spyware-using) affiliates who are ripped off by the practices I documented.
Re:Ben Edelman, here (Score:4, Interesting)
Sponsored-search advertising is a ripoff. Google makes the vast majority of their money this way and I take issue. We have run numerous campaigns and stopped due to the lack of quantification. Talking with other merchants, people are starting to get disgusted by the google/yahoo/ms advertising avenues. clickfraud is rampant and we end up paying for it. recently, every time google releases earnings i can't help but laugh. all it takes is for a adwords merchant to start a campaign and watch their traffic and usage for a month to see what is going on. my feeling is that there is no better solution for online advertising, so people feel the need to do _something_, so they will continue to pay because they feel it is better than nothing.
Re:Ben Edelman, here (Score:5, Interesting)
Spyware will become clean... (Score:4, Interesting)
Serves them right? (Score:4, Interesting)
Now google has a till option.... (Score:5, Interesting)
If I am running a site selling certain goods, then I don't really care how many hits I get, I'm bothered about how many sales I get.
Now if google can set up an adwords system for me that does not charge per click, but instead I use their payment system as a check out and grant them a commission on refered sales (as long as they can prove that the refereal was sent via a targetted ad in the current browser session would be my condition) then they can take say 5% of the sale (on top of their normal processing comission.
Then the problem comes down to trusting google to correctly report which sales on your site are actually directly from one of their adverts and not from their main search.... however its only one company, its a large and well known company so auditing it would be a lot easier than many of the smaller more dubious companies.
Re:Ben Edelman, here (Score:5, Interesting)
TV ads continue to be annoying and people are actively avoiding them now. Instead of making better commercials that don't annoy people, they just keep shelling out the money for the same old crap.
Radio, ditto.
Newspapers, magazines... Other than the sale ads and video game magazines (which are disappointing, because the ads rarely tell you anything the actual game), I don't think I've bothered to do more than glance at an ad in years.
How is 'sponsored-search advertising' any different?
And you say 'clickfraud is rampant.'
Re:Ben Edelman, here (Score:1, Interesting)
I've also always thought that any merchant that pays for click-throughs or indirect referrals are foolish. It is just too easy to game those processes.
Here's a question or few for you (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Ben Edelman, here (Score:3, Interesting)
From what I read, the merchants are paying for advertising results that they would have received for free. That, in turn, forces merchants to spend more money on advertising and ultimately results in higher prices for consumers.
Yes, it is frustrating. (Score:5, Interesting)
The usual responses are that "You are exaggerating the dangers", and "I have nothing of value for anyone to steal in my computer" or "it is too complex to lock the machine down" or "I dont know how to lock the machine down" or "there are millions of people who dont lock their machine down, are they all fools and are you the only smart guy out there".
Their file sharing stops working. They call the tech. Some cousin of me from India walks them step-by-step to turn off the firewall in the router so that "he can come in and fix it", turns off the firewall in the machine, turns on remote assistance, fixes something and leaves. For the tech guy the metric is "minutes to solve the problem". Staying on line to turn back all the firewalls and turning off remote-assistances "does not pay". The machine gets pwend even before he is done and he recommends wiping the hard disk and restoring, wiping out everything the customer had in the disk.
It is a torture to be the one-eyed man in the land of the blind.
Re:Capital S? (Score:4, Interesting)
I do not care if the grammar nazis give me a d-, I refuse to comply.
Re:Ben Edelman, here (Score:4, Interesting)
Click fraud can happen on Google's "content network". I just happen to be looking at one of my ads right now. In the last week, it's been shown 104 times on Google's pages. It's been shown 13,636 times on other pages using Google's Adsense. You know, the Google ads on other peoples' pages.
If I run a site and put Adsense on it, I get a percentage of Google's revenue for each ad clicked through from my site. Therefore, if I have more click-throughs, I get paid more. That's where click fraud comes in. The advertiser gets a higher bill due to more clicks, and Google pays the fraudulent Adsense operator a portion of the revenue.
You can opt out of your ads being shown on the content network, or even on certain sites. But as you can see from the numbers above, you'll be losing out on a HUGE percentage of your ad impressions. OTOH, in my experience the CTR off Google's sites is higher than the content network CTR, and quite possibly depending on what your product is, the people might be more qualified.
Re:Ben Edelman, here (Score:2, Interesting)
In this case the attack worked, prior to the attack I was averaging around 1,000 clicks per month legitimately and thus gaining reasonable revenues which paid for hosting, domain registration and various other services (such as occasional professional design services to help with certain things I am less skilled at), until one evening there is an extremely strong worded scathing comment written by some anonymous user, the next morning I wake up to discover 1,896 clicks in one night which all originated from the same IP as that comment (thanks google for giving that info), my account by this point had been blocked.
I immediately contacted google, explained the situations, provided server logs and other relevant info re the comment and the massive amount of traffic generated by that IP during the night on my own site including raw server logs of this general traffic also. Google then provided me with their statistical information on clicks in that time period not raw data however which I can understand on privacy grounds (it would have included legitimate users also, I had removed data not relating to the suspect IP in my own logs I sent out of respect for my legitimate users who had committed no crime which is what this amounts to). Their representative even agreed that it was quite clear to them this was a case of a click fraud attack aimed at causing my disqualification, however they would not even consider reinstatement even under any kind of trial basis which eventually lead to me being forced to abandon the site on financial grounds not being able to find another system able to generate such reasonable revenues that covered the costs, with acceptable ad formats which were not overly obtrusive.
So to suggest they do not take click fraud serious is not something I can believe, with a one strike and you are out no questions asked policy irrespective of evidence proving the publishers innocence when any click fraud of any description is detected by their system resulting in a lifetime ban from the scheme seams to me like extremely stringent anti click fraud policies to me, too stringent in reality when clear evidence of innocence on the part of the publisher and evidence the fraud was actually an attack on the publisher and their funding mechanism for their website with the intention of making it impossible to keep the website online is beyond unreasonable.
Not to mention the $612.45 in legitimate click revenues they withheld and and dropped into their own coffers which is in itself wrong in my opinion especially when they themselves agree that the publisher was the victim of a targeted attack they should have at least had the decency to settle the account for all the legitimate clicks.