March 03, 2005
Ack! Click fraud is coming. Click fraud is coming.
There has been a great deal of news flying around lately about the growing threat of click fraud. Everyone is in a lather all of the sudden. Even though the complaints have been growing slowly but surely over the past year or so. Apparently, click fraud is top of mind for 2005. Today, the New York Times came out with an article on the plague that is click fraud. And that means it's real, apparently. I saw that AdPulp ran something on it, as did MarketingVOX and PaidContent. And lookie here, so am I. Go figure.(UPDATE: Interesting articles from ClickZ on the subject here and here.)
For those of you who don't follow the online-advertising market, "click fraud" refers to the practice of a) clicking on cost-per-action ads on your own properties to increase your revenue, b) clicking on competitors' cost-per-action ads that appear on search engines and other sites in an effort to deplete their advertising budgets, and c) sending bots or manually clicking on useless spam ads to make them seem like viable ads, hence raising their visibility in some engines that rank ads by applicability. There's also a good explanation in the Times article. A close cousin of the click fraud is the elder "impression fraud," which uses similar techniques to influence cost-per-impression ads, a more ancient beast.
Is it a problem? Sure it is. As both a purchaser of cost-per-action ads and a host of cost-per-action ads, I see it as a dishonest practice, and one that needs to be handled, like all dishonesty. One way or the other, it's stealing. Plain and simple. So, it's not good. Just because you can doesn't mean that you should.
But as much as I hate it, you know what? I'll let you in on a dirty little secret. This is nothing new. "Click fraud" has been a scourge (thanks MarketingVOX for that perfect descriptor) of the print industry for eons.
Now, I've mentioned before that I work in high-tech. But for those of you who have just arrived, welcome! Grab a drink and... oh wait. For those of you who have just arrived, I thought I'd let you know. It's neither here nor there, but it serves as my point of reference. Anyway. Like any industry, high-tech has hundreds of vertical publications, of which I receive about 80%. Yes, they're usually 8.5x11 or some iteration of that perspective, but I mean they're vertical in that they speak to a vertical market. In this case, it's high-tech, but everyone has a multitude that apply to his or her vertical market(s).
Now, why, you ask, would I pay to receive all of these magazines? I don't. I have free subscriptions to them. Every few weeks, I get a new "free subscription" offer from one of the publishing houses, offering me a year's worth of a book, just for providing some demographic information. Easy. Super cheap. Keeps me informed. I'm willing to do it. Yes, yes. I'm willing to trade my privacy for a freebie. Let's keep this on the up-and-up, shall we? There's no need for name-calling.
So I provide my information. Guess what? I just joined the "subscriber base." And the next time that pub goes out to find a potential advertiser, you can be sure they're reporting me as a subscriber. You can also be sure that I appear in their demographic breakouts by title and industry. And you can be absolutely sure that the next "media metrics" report they proffer as gospel will include my eyeballs. Showing those advertisers how influential their print campaign has been.
This is click fraud. I'm not a serious purchaser of most of the products in these publications. Do I make purchasing decisions for a certain amount? Sure. But I'm not running out and buying an ERP system or something. For the most part, the only interest I have in the ads is "seeing what everyone else is doing."
And that's not all. Part of providing my demographic information is providing my email address. Being one who likes to see what everyone else is doing, I always select the options to receive promotional emails from both the publication and it's oh-so-carefully-selected list of vendors. So, I'm a regular recipient of direct email marketing folks. And I regularly click on the links of the information I receive to see what everyone else is doing.
That is click fraud. While I'm interested in reading the information and seeing what's what, I'm not a valid click-through for that customer. If there were a way to eliminate myself as a statistic, I would choose that option. But there isn't. Because the next time the publication reports to a client or potential client on the success of their email campaigns, there I will be. Another digit in the click trail.
And the most critical element of this whole numbers game is the piece I haven't yet mentioned: I tell the truth on those cards and in those emails. I've got nothing to gain by not telling the truth. I'm a potential advertiser with the publication. If they won't give me a free subscription, I can likely get a comp subscription from my ad rep. But, I'm pretty darn sure there are quite a few people who don't tell the truth on those things. There are those people who are trying to work the system. Or there are those people who are trying to protect their information by providing incorrect demographic information. Or there may be a variety of other reasons. It doesn't matter. That false information is being reported as the truth to potential advertisers. And it encourages those advertisers to pay for advertising in the publication. And it encourages current clients to continue paying for advertising because of the perceived return on investment.
And what's that kids? That's right. Click fraud. People are just clicking with their eyes instead of their mouse.
And I haven't even broached the "preferential discount" subscriber base. You know the "you belong to such and such organization so we're going to give this to you super cheap" subscription?
So, click fraud, as it were, is not a new beast. It's been around. It's just now, there are companies making billions of dollars in Web-based ad revenue, and that makes us stop and think. And there's a way of tracking it. And there's a way of reporting on it. And in some ways, there's the loss of a middleman, and the loss of that disavowed knowledge of any wrongdoing.
Maybe, this focus on click fraud will help clean up the whole darn mess. Or maybe it will just be perceived as the burden of those evil dotcoms that are making all the money and causing the print media types to suffer. Or maybe we'll just learn to accept it as a known evil, forcing us to take it with the same "win some, lose some, 50% of it works" grain of salt we've used to digest the big budgets of print advertising all these years.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I've got a free-subscription card to complete.
Do you have another example of click fraud? Or do you think my diatribe is off base? Let me know. Comment comment comment. And please, return, won't you?
Ack! Click fraud is coming. Click fraud is coming.
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