Click Fraud on Yahoo: No Click Required
- By: kidmercury [privmsg - website] On 4th Apr 2006 In
Click fraud: Google claims to be immune to it, while Yahoo enables its innovation. Ben Edelman reports that Yahoo PPC ads that are syndicated in spyware allow the advertiser to be charged even when the ad is not clicked on. What Edelman is essentially saying has occurred is that the spyware delivers a popup and redirects the user to the site of a Yahoo advertiser, even though the user did not click on the ad. The advertiser was charged for this on a CPC basis.
Advertiser Lasikcookeye is the victim of these practices and the victim of this click fraud. Lasikcookeye contracted with Yahoo to buy pay-per-click ads shown at Yahoo.com when users performed relevant searches. Lasikcookeye intended (and reasonably expected) that its ad would be shown to appropriate users, and that it would only be charged if a user saw the ad, found it appealing, and specifically chose to click on it. Instead, Lasikcookeye here was charged for a "click" that never took place, and for its site being shown to a user who never asked to see it. Furthermore, Lasikcookeye's site was shown in a popup, an advertising format users are known to dislike, which risks damaging Lasikcookeye's good name.
Kind of makes you wonder about Yahoo's partnership with Claria.
via TechDirt
I'm jumping in right away...
...without reading that long, long (but well researched by the glimpse of it) story.
From the overview here at TW and the first couple paragraphs it looks like Yahoo is being blamed (and maybe they should for not researching things further but they don't know to research until they have been notified of such things...which now they have and should drop that spyware, err, tool provider from their network).
I will not say anymore and I don't think Yahoo is to blame as there is a bigger situation here. What tool providers (aka spyware) do inside their tools is usually outside of any marketing programs being integrated. Yahoo assumes their program will be used within its terms.
I wish all this would go away for a rainy day. :)
(boy, people are gonna b!tch about that statement)
SB
just another in a long line of exploits possible
This is one of the possible exploits that make it very difficult to police and revoke clicks which shouldn't be charged to advertisers, as we were all hashing over in this other recent thread on click fraud.
As I've tried to point out to my optimistic fellow-threaders, the internet infrastructure itself is built in such a way that companies' abilities to detect and halt click fraud are extremely limited.
This particular exploit tends to make clicks appear to be somewhat naturally distributed to internet users, negating some methods for profiling of bad IPs.
Note: I'm not saying this is impossible to detect, but it's just one of the many difficult fraud process methods that one has to take into account. For cases like this one, the hope would most likely be to identify the ad "publisher" for having suspicious activity through certain pattern recognition. But, it could be easily missed, since there are very few measures available to flag it. IP addresses would be okay. Referral URLs might not be available in the environmental variables, which, alone, isn't a solid red-flag since there are valid reasons why user interactions might not carry the referrer variable. So, you're left with some pattern-recognition methods which will have a very high error rate, by nature.
I've written an article on how Pay For Call is superior to PPC because there is less chance for machine-driven exploits, if anyone's interested.
You're right about Claria's ad delivery methods -- it's thinly veiled adware which users hate and often drives up their despisement of the ads and their associated companies. Users often do not read the Ts & Cs when they download applications because the legaleaze is too lengthy and convoluted, so they are not consciously accepting the adware. Their whole ad delivery model is based upon users accidentally accepting their terms! Not a nice way to do business, IMHO.