YAOAACF by San Jose Business Journal

No easy answers for advertisers suffering from online click fraud
By Mark Larson

Small businesses are increasingly turning to third party "click monitoring" companies as a way to help prevent being charged for the type of phantom business that recently cost Google Inc. $90 million in an Arkansas court settlement.

Nothing new here apart from exposure for a couple of companies.

MySpace: A Click Fraud Social Network?

IncrediBILL's Random Rants: MySpace: A Click Fraud Social Network?

Check out my fellow WW member's post exposing major web properties such as Blogger and YouTube for apparently ignoring posters who encourage clicking ads. Here are some YouTube posters who encourage clicks.

Clickprints on the Web

Wharton professor Balaji Padmanabhan and Yinghui Yang, a professor at the Graduate School of Management at the University of California, Davis have published a paper entitled, "Clickprints on the Web: Are There Signatures in Web Browsing Data?" They reveal how it is possible to identify unique users based merely on their browsing behaviour.

These professors are on the right track, but they are looking at finding click patterns of individuals more so than finding suspicious click behaviour. This could be useful for "confirming" that a single user at a multi-user IP address is generating invalid clicks.

AdSense publisher clicks ads on her site; sues Google

Now this isn't click fraud in the usual sense but a funny story about a woman whose AdSense account was cancelled because she admitted clicking ads on her own site. She mustn't have read the ToS or heard of the preview tool.

The thread in Geek Village is funny too.

Yet another click fraud lawsuit (YACFL)

Why am I not surprised to read about yet another click fraud lawsuit?

This eweek article mentions a proposed class action against Google by one Samuel Lasoff. He seems to be an advertiser but the article talks about aggrieved publishers:

"and accuses Google of exposing publishers to click fraud following a breach of contract,"

I can't find the original filing in the PA courthouse (what a quaint, 1990s web site!) so I can't tell if he is a publisher or advertiser. He certainly appears to be an affiliate, so I suspect he had Adwords pointing to his sites.

Let's see what happens.

Click! Mouse fraud bytes web advertisers

Emma Connors and Mark Jones have written about click fraud in today's Australian Financial Review. Unfortunately the article cannot be viewed online for free. They write that Nielsen/NetRatings is starting research into this issue in Australia. They are going to look at the behaviour of IP addresses, exactly what I said in the same article!

Also quoted is ClickSentinel, which claims that 30% of clicks are fraudulent. I wonder if Shuman Ghosemajumder's team at Google will look into this claim next. :)