The Click-Fraud Elephant

A recent BusinessWeek story on Click Fraud has brought the subject to the forefront again, and not surprisingly Esther Dyson has called out the heart of the matter; this problem could be solved.

Google and Yahoo need to stop pretending the problem is in click-stream analysis, and move to distribution-partner analysis. Further, advertisers need to make it 100% clear that paying to run ads on un-named websites over which they have no say or control is unacceptable.

Click fraud doesn’t come (in any significant quantity) from serious sites. It comes from junk sites on which no advertiser would ever intentionally decide to place their ads. Surely there are some PHDs running around the GooglePlex that can look at a wasteland landing page full of nothing but sludge and PPC ads and decide that ‘the best user experience’ is not served by syndicating ads onto that site.

And there can be no reason to avoid providing advertisers with full and complete transparency as to which sites their ads run on, and providing full control over these sites on an individual and group basis (imagine a blacklist shared among advertisers) except for the fact that the networks know that these sites are junk and everyone would opt-out immediately if they could.

Is there a PPC-Advertiser Federation? How many millions of dollars of monthly spend would it take to collectively get the attention of these networks to demand these changes?

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