India Tops Clickfraud Chart
By Rafat Ali - Mon 25 Feb 2008 12:17 PM PST
[by Cerius Shah] Back in 2004 the Times did an article on clickfarms in India which got widely publicized. Clickforensics, a clickfraud detection firm (via Pluggd.in) amongst several others has released stats which place India in the top bracket (4.3 percent) followed by Germany (3.9 percent) and South Korea (3.7 percent). Inorder to minimize fraud, most SEM firms use a time-limit filter between clicks, but considering a large proportion of surfers access the web from offices, which are usually centered around one IP block, there may be more to this than meets the eye. According to TC, nearly one out of every three clicks on Google (NSDQ: GOOG) or Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO) is fraudulent.
Of the various estimates I have heard, one gave the ratio of 60 percent of all Pay Per Click being fraudulent. The tip jar system of ‘like a blog? click on the ad” is widely prevalent amongst most community websites and blog rolls here.
One mechanism is switching to a Cost Per Action model, whose use in case of services is obvious but in case of content firms can be linked to time spent, maximum bounce rate in case of geographies and a minimum metric of pages viewed per visitor instead of dumb unique visitor stats.
Posted in: Advertising
