If a user of my site asks me how the ads work and I say that I get paid if users click them ... Is that click fraud?
Example of click fraud: I get paid when users click my ads. The more money this website makes the less time I have to spend working hourly at Starbucks. Less time at Starbucks means more time working on my website, writing content, and making videos.
Btw, he says he was doing this in his blog post.
From Merriam-Webster:
a : deceit, trickery; specifically : intentional perversion of truth in order to induce another to part with something of value or to surrender a legal right
b : an act of deceiving or misrepresenting : trick
He is deceiving the advertisers. They are paying for people interested in the ad, thats not what they are getting.
> The fact is that there is no tractable way for Google to separate people who are interested in supporting an ad-driven business from those who really are creating false ad traffic for financial gain.
Correct, but we can look at the average CTRs of other sites/blogs that focus on the same subject. That should give us a good understand of foul play (yes, of course there will be some false positives).
The truth of the situation is: you click, I get paid. There is no moral value attached to such an action in and of itself. If anything, it is Google's own fault for putting itself in a position for charging advertisers to place ads in a medium it does not and cannot control. It is the very definition of a moral hazard.
http://banking.about.com/od/loans/a/MoralHazard.htm
What makes it particularly troubling is that Google not only owns the ad network but also controls the content distribution in the form of Youtube.
Google prides itself as a data-driven company, and this "false positive" is likely due to a "statistical likelihood" of click-fraud, but that's small comfort to a small business owner who does not have the resources to contest or appeal such a heavy-handed measure.
Should google have seized the revenue from his YouTube videos? Was he able to talk to someone and explain that they were separate things and get it worked our? No, again, arbitrary power.
The problem here is that when something is questionable google exercises arbitrary power with no explanation or human interaction.
I got kicked out of ad sense because google said that ads were showing up on porn (my site is pure user generated content). I couldn't find it for the longest time, when I finally found it i was unsure how to handle it. It was text content that was in a foreign language which I didn't speak.
There was no way for me to talk to someone at google and resolve it.