

New wave of fraud hits pay-per-click ads - razorburn
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/13/business/media/13adco.html

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dbul
_“Click fraud should be at the top of the priority list with Obama and the
F.T.C.,” said Jeff Chester_

Questionable judgement of priorities aside, isn't this really the
responsibility of the ad networks? What is the FTC going to do about such a
complicated problem.

When I read about all of these problems with click fraud or a network not
paying out, I can't help but think there may be an opening for a startup to
develop a more concrete method of connecting an advertiser with a user.

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pierrefar
I think the first step is transparency on the part of the networks like Google
and Yahoo! and the rest. They need to share more (all?) the data they have so
they can be scruitinzed by the advertisers. Right now, Google is essentially
saying "Trust us" and frankly, that's not enough.

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anamax
> They need to share more (all?) the data they have so they can be scruitinzed
> by the advertisers. Right now, Google is essentially saying "Trust us" and
> frankly, that's not enough.

Google doesn't "need" to do anything of the sort. You want them to.

If Google isn't satisfying you, go to someone who does. If your needs/wants
are important to enough people, Google will either adapt or die.

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3pt14159
I would venture that this article is either fake, or cars.com has an
incompetent marketing/dev team. At my current employer we optimize down to the
hour-country-keyword, so how could cars.com be wasting all this money on
irrelevant clicks?

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paraschopra
It looked to me as a marketing blurb for Click Forensics

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Harkins
<http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html>

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swolchok
I think it's time for a follow-up article on social news site crapspam.

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mildweed
Bot nets clicking ads on their own sites? Difficult to detect, but nothing
Google and Yahoo can't handle detecting.

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earl
So... I have a personal experience with newcars. I would be very surprised if
their ad optimization team was really on the ball -- they tried to recruit me
as a quant for a $15-$20K pay cut for a company that isn't a startup and
offers no equity but the _potential_ of a 10-15% of salary annual bonus. So
this speaks to the quality of people they are willing to afford.

