!#”¤#” Service Pack 2 crashed my computer – thank God for friends with rescue disks. Even if getting back took a while.
It’ll probably be best if the link building strategy focuses on stopclickfraud.com – I’ll have a talk with Floyd Fisher who set it up and see if we can’t set up a mailing list there too, for wider coordination of our efforts. It’s probably better to keep the efforts focused on a site set up specifically to inform about the problem instead of muddling the issue by directing to one of my domains set up to try to draw some of the PTR clickers away from being part of the click fraud machine by giving them a strategy for starting something real for themselves instead of clicking their lives away at the computer.
It’s sort of a two-pronged effort really, drain away the brute manpower of the people performing the false clicks for the fraudsters by directing them into more constructive avenues like affiliate programs and eBay, and starve the scammers from above by cutting them off from easy money from the search engine advertisers by forcing the feeds to clamp down on the way they organize the fradulent traffic.
Because even the affiliate programs and traffic partnerships of the search engines aren’t really the problem – it’s the fact that they don’t react to obvious abuses like their affiliates advertising through PTR programs and essentially paying people to search; or not enough at any rate. It appears that last year they clamped down on paid-to-search sections in those programs to the point where only a few of them still have them up and running – but they failed to ban the implicit incentivising of searches by banning all the paid-to-read programs.
Essentially, PTR is a major locus for the click fraud – without them the ones committing the fraud would have a harder time gathering the neccesary manpower to do it on such a large scale as the current state lets them.
And until the feeds and engines clamp down on that stuff, advertisers are gonna keep on being bled to the point of pain.
Yes, fraud’s always gonna be a risk and a cost of doing business, but removing a major locus is going to keep it more under control. Because fraud’s a discincentive to perform in an economically rational manner in any economy; and as for the search engines they really should understand that it creates bottom-race conditions where the advertisers are not bidding rationally to maximise profits from their products but to minimise fraud loss on their advertising.
In other words, there’s a reason why any functioning economy tries their level best to clamp down on parasitic economic behaviour like fraud and protection rackets – it’s not good for society as a whole since the only choice for the businesses is to pass the cost of fraud on to the consumer. In other words, massive fraud such as this costs everyone in the long run.
By the way – ever seen Kanoodle unbilled_click in your logs? That’s the fourth and subsequent click from a PTR searcher on your ad that day; and that’s one of the mechanisms that’s been used to hide the fraud from you all.
Of course, you get twit answers like this:
well this Norwegian is not serious. he wants to build a business on click fraud information.
u do marketing for him.
no thx. we need non-profit action not one more guy selling ebooks about marketing.
Err, no – I ain’t selling this info; if I was I’d have made something like http://www.whosclickingwho.com/ – if you read their ad copy they clearly know about where the major part of the fraud is coming from and developed a solution to cash in on it instead of making their information public.
Me, I spendt four months on this instead of ignoring it and keeping on with my major job as a freelance copywriter – instead of writing sales copy for clients, I’ve been documenting this fraud.
Or you get even less helpful responses like
SOMEONE’S MAKING A LOT OF MONEY FROM YOUR PPC BUDGET-
WHAT A PITY IT ISN’T YOUReally?
Well, I hope all of my competitors join the boycott.
Sure – have fun being the only guy paying the PPC engines, and I hope you enjoy it as much as I did when the PTR frausters chewed through my accounts in a few days. ‘Cause – you know what? If the rest of us pull out – guess who’s gonna be the only worthwhile target for the scammers?
So it doesn’t much matter if that guy isn’t feeling the pain right now, because the more people pull out from the PPC engines, the more pain the people who are left will feel when the frausters start running out of targets.
It gets lonely out in the open, you know?
Of course, if he sticks with Google and Overture he’s prolly gonna be much less of a target; the fraud isn’t hitting them as hard – yet.
Although Google has some ways to go when it comes to reining in publishers making minimal sites and advertising them through PTR – and Overture feeds out to Bannerfox who feeds out to Blazerunner – and Blazerunner is very, very popular in the PTR world.
If the other feeds rein in their affiliates… well, the fraudsters aren’t going to go away until something is done about the whole Paid-to-read thing and the easy money the search affiliates are making from them…