New wave of fraud hits pay-per-click ads | Hacker News Reader

New wave of fraud hits pay-per-click ads

nytimes.com

16 pointsrazorburn11 comments

“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.

Agreed. With all that's going on, it's not the government's job to regulate click fraud. It's up to publishers and advertisers to figure it out.

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.

> 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.

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?

Didn't the article discuss cloaking? Even if you did optimize the time and keyword, country would be intensely difficult.

It looked to me as a marketing blurb for Click Forensics

http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html

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

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

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.

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