Click Fraud: Not Just a Scam, a Sport!

An article today in MediaPost today reports that a company called Click Forensics estimates that 28 percent of the clicks on those Google and Yahoo text ads found next to search results, blogs and various web sites are fraudulent. This is to say the are clicked on with malicious intent, in order to generate revenue for the websites that host the ads.

To vastly oversimplify a very complicated process of auctions, algorithms and audacity: Let’s say an advertiser agrees to pay Google 15 cents for every click that comes from its ad to its site. Google drops the ads on sites or search results whose content corresponds to the material in the ad. Google collects 15 cents times 120 jillion for each click to the ad, or whatever its current reach is. If the ad is on a blog or web site, Google gives (say) 5 cents to the site for each click. Google keeps a dime. Advertiser gets qualified leads. Win-win-win.

Unless it turns out those clicks are generated by robots or stooges in the employ of blogs or websites that host the ads, trying to steal from advertisers 5 cents at a time–which, the report suggests, happens with 28 percent of all such clicks.

As someone with no investment in the Adwords game–and who rarely clicks on those ads–I’m not sure what all this means to the larger world of commerce. But I offer this curious observation: When the MediaPost story on click fraud showed up in my Gmail inbox, the ads below appeared next to it. I invite you to click them all–either to strike a blow for purity in web commerce or, if you like, purely for sport. It certainly won’t make me–or cost me–any money.

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Adsense? Nonsense!

As you may have noticed, for the past couple of years our friends at Google have been placing a scrim of ads down the right rail on its “free” e-mail service, Gmail. This is one of the marquee applications of Google’s Adsense technology, which (the company says) uses sophisticated algorithms to deliver targeted ads to e-mail users in real time.

If you’ve spent any time with Gmail, you’ve probably also noticed that–to be very kind–it remains a work in progress. I can’t recall a single time I clicked on or frankly even took more than a fast glance at the ads.

I decided to take a closer look. I enlisted my friend “Ed” (not his real e-mail alias) to see whether we could get Google to rise to stupid-bait, by dangling keyword-rich e-mail in front of its ad servers. 

Ed–The news isn’t very good. I lost my job and I’m looking for work, probably in the online world. Do you know any good resume services, or headhunters I might contact?

Oh, and by the way, I think it is lyme disease that I have. The chronic kind. This may explain why I’ve lost my sex drive. I think it’s my turn to win the lottery.–cs

Well, that got the ol’ algorithm’s attention. When Ed wrote back, here’s what appeared on the right rail. [I've eliminated the URLs to protect the victims. Or the perps. I can't tell.]

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I’m guessing Google has plenty of Adwords advertisers bidding for keywords like jobs, sex and lottery, but fewer looking to cozy up to Lyme. I leave it to the wizards of Mountain View to figure out how its algorithms failed to parse “lyme disease” from “Lyme, Connecticut.” [Professor George Boole, your Blackberry is buzzing!]

Ed wrote back:

Sorry to hear about your job. Maybe you can go online and FIND A GOOD JOB. I have ricketts and I don’t even know what they are. Hopefully it will respond to daily doses of cialis. I mean cheap cialis.-ed

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All right, Friar Google picked up the no-job theme. But aside from that, he appears to have gone dead from the neck up.

Or could this be evidence of some super-secret breakthrough artificial intelligence algorithm Google has developed? Maybe the ad server somehow “knows” it bobbled the easy “cheap cialis” toss and instead delivered the utterly inexplicable “Mormon Ringtone” ad. Understanding its own dismal failure, it solicits help from me–knowing I’m looking for work in the online field–to bolster its own analytics team! I’ll bet the folks in Redmond are trembling in their Sketchers.

Ed and I batted a couple of more mails back and forth. An inane administrative message alerting Ed to this whole foolish exercise arrived with a brain-stumping strip of ads for Bollywood videos and memorabilia.

One e-mail I gleefully stuffed with random adbait–an impressive oratorio invoking baldness, a Vietnamese potbellied pig, American Girl dolls, video games, erectile dysfunction, animal cruelty, and an idea for a screenplay about a lonely young Internet guy looking for work–showed up with no ads at all. Ed’s return note to me, however, included a link inviting me to take a quiz to determine how “logical” I am.

Our time with AdSense had been fun, but I was ready to move on.

Ed, I think this may be the last time you hear from me for a while. I am going to spend some several weeks alone with no computer access. I’m not even going to look for a job. I leave you with the following thought.

“If we took it away, there would be mass protests worldwide,” said Marissa Mayer, vice president for search products and user experience. “It’s part of our heritage. It’s part of what users really like about us.”

[Mayer, I should point out, is a well-known Google VP. This quote, explaining what she thinks would happen if the "I’m Feeling Lucky" search option were removed from Google’s main page, appeared in the Washington Post. I just stuck it in my e-mail to see if I could give Adsense a nervous tic, or a mini-stroke.]

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Now that’s a stumper. I’d clearly informed Google–indirectly, of course, through my friend “Ed”–that I was heading off the e-grid, and no longer looking for work. And yet the recruitment pitches only multiplied. Makes you wonder whether the company really has cracked that whole “sophisticated algorithm” and “contextual keyword analysis” thing. Or maybe they have, and Mayer’s looking for work. Beats me.

Anyhow, it’s easy to spend a whole day making Adsense dance like a drunken capuchin. But let’s be fair. Gmail is still technically in beta, and it’s only been serving ads along with e-mail since, what, 2004? The company has a  track record of improving products as it goes. So let’s not write off the whole program as an unintentionally amusing, sense-of-privacy-unsettling curiosity.

The beauty of the Adsense business model is that with an estimated 62 billion (!) e-mails scooting around the world each day, Google needs only a fraction of that traffic, and to serve up the proper ads only once in a while, to have a tidy little business. Since advertisers pay only when their ads are clicked on, nobody gets hurt when Brother Google’s head spins. 

Which is to say: Give enough monkeys enough keyboards, and eventually one of them is going to be seeking overnight accommodations in Lyme, Conn.