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Google Sued Over Click Fraud 285

Posted by Zonk from the clicky-click dept.
tanveer1979 writes "A seller of online marketing tools has sued Google over click fraud, accusing it of failing to protect clients from spurious clicks over web ads. The suit claims damages of $5 million and is seeking class action status. Sites get money per click from the advertisers. Rival companies of the advertiser may employ people to repeatedly click on the advertisers link on Google costing them large amount of money. Google denied the allegations. From the article: 'We believe the suit is without merit and we will defend ourselves against it vigorously.'" Interesting turnaround.
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Google Sued Over Click Fraud More

Google Sued Over Click Fraud

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  • Not much of a turnaround. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Sebastian Jansson ( 823395 ) on Thursday June 30, 2005 @07:55AM (#12949364) Homepage
    Google sues people for click inflating, for the sake of their customers.

    Google's customer sues Google for not doing enough.

  • Deep Pockets (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Nick Driver ( 238034 ) on Thursday June 30, 2005 @07:55AM (#12949367)
    Since Google now has pretty deep pockets, you can expect an endless stream of all kinds of wierd-ass lawsuits filed against them.
    • First, since this company isn't an actual customer my guess is that their suit will be thrown out for lack of standing.

      However, there is a valid issue here. I would guess that Google is responsible for two things. 1 Notifying customers when they detected a non-trivial amount of fraud. 2 To make a good faith effort to combat this fraud.

      Failure to perform either of these could open up Google to some amount of liability.

    • The new economy (Score:3, Insightful)

      by nurb432 ( 527695 )
      Welcome to the new economy, run by lawyers, to benefit lawyers.

      The lawyers win either way...

  • wait... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by tiberiandusk ( 894649 ) on Thursday June 30, 2005 @07:56AM (#12949373) Journal
    wasn't there an article a while ago about how google was trying to stop this since they were losing a ton of money to fake clicks? i think every online advertising company in the world has been working on this problem for a long time. suing them won't fix the problem but it will get all those lawyers a lot of money.

    • Re:wait... (Score:4, Informative)

      by surprise_audit ( 575743 ) on Thursday June 30, 2005 @08:18AM (#12949508)
      Yeah. That was what was being referred to in the Interesting turnaround link right at the end of the summary....

    • Re:wait... (Score:3, Insightful)

      by kawika ( 87069 )
      Google isn't necessarily losing any money at all to fake clicks. Google MAKES money on fake clicks because they take a cut of the money from every click. Google's advertisers lose the money. Long term, the risk that Google runs is that the advertisers lose confidence in the legitimacy of Adwords/Adsense and look for other alternatives. At the moment, the other alternatives are more corrupt and less principled than Google, IMO.

    • These are the answer, I think. Its only an area we have been getting into lately, but its showing a great deal of promise. How it works is like this; you get people to put adverts up on their site, someone clicks on the advert, browses your site, then make a purchase. Not until a purchase is made do advertisers get paid. There is no chance for fraud, unless its someone using stolen credit cards, and then there are defences, chargebacks, and well established legal routes that can be taken. Besides, all onli

      • I have to disagree based on the fact that very few internet purchases are made on the first visit so that plan would screw the search engines. typicaly when I research a potential purchase, I google first, visit the site create a bookmark folder for the results and then i poke around a lot, finaly I go back and make my purchase. Most of this is going to look like abandoned shopping carts, and click-fraud from your perspective. Trying to quantify advertising and purchasing to the degree that online advertise
      • There are a lot of problems with your method. Here are two examples.

        I put an ad on my site to your store. Because of my ad, you get 10 new sales per week. How exactly am I to know that you are getting 10 extra sales per week from the ads on my site? Should I trust that you will report all 10 sales to me and pay me for those 10 sales? What if you want to save some money and only report and pay me for 8 of the 10 sales I generated for you? How would I ever find out? Should I have to go take you to co

  • Not google's fault (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Arthur B. ( 806360 ) on Thursday June 30, 2005 @07:57AM (#12949374)
    They don't have to sued Google over this, but the people commiting click fraud... I mean, they sign a contract in which they agree to pay for each click, it's never mentionned that Google will ensure that all clicks are legits... I don't think they have the slightest chance to make a point in court. Now Google could prrobably provide protection, but they won't have to. Eventually, protection (unique clicks, time spent on site etc) will arise with competition on ad placement as a required service.

    • Re:Not google's fault (Score:2, Interesting)

      by bedroll ( 806612 )
      They do have to sue Google. Google is their vendor. Their alternative to suing Google would be to file a suit against an unknown - or if they suspect a specific company they could name them, but I doubt that's the case - company and subpoena Google for their advertising business's records. It's much more likely to be a longer and more expensive case that way, though.

      What they want is this: Google actively monitor's for click fraud. Google sues company X for click fraud. Company Y sues Google for similar d
    • What ever happened to personal responsibility? Is the legal system so distorted that responsibility isn't a factor? Plus, isn't real financial interest a requirement to bring a suit?

      I could see that if Google promised click verification in their contract with the advertisers, those advertisers could sue Google, if they could show the clicks are fraudulent. But I can't sue Google, as I have no financial interest in that transaction.

      Let's say I own a house, but the front door isn't metal and the lock isn't
    • They don't have to sued Google over this, but the people commiting click fraud... I mean, they sign a contract in which they agree to pay for each click, it's never mentionned that Google will ensure that all clicks are legits... I don't think they have the slightest chance to make a point in court.

      They don't have to sued McDonald's over this, but the people commiting click fraud... I mean, they sign a contract in which they agree to pay for each hamburger, it's never mentionned that McDonald's will ens
      • > it's never mentionned that McDonald's will ensure that all hamburgers are not rotten

        There are health & safety regulations involving food outlets and the quality of the food you serve. As in laws.

        No such thing for clicks.
        • It's called "good faith". The courts will probably determine whether or not it's reasonable to expect Google to protect you from fraud, and to what extent.

          There are health & safety regulations involving food outlets and the quality of the food you serve. As in laws.

          You're talking about civil vs. legal. Two completely different things. If McDonald's sells me a rotten hamburger, I can sue, and the Dept of Health & Human Svcs. can shut them down. The safety laws have nothing to do with the t

  • Previous suit will help... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by jdreed1024 ( 443938 ) on Thursday June 30, 2005 @07:57AM (#12949380)
    Interesting turnaround.

    Not really. Google sued people who were artificially inflating their clicks. Now, someone is saying Google does nothing about click inflation. Who knows the specific of this individual case, but clearly Google has done *something* about click inflation.

  • what exactly google does to stop fraud? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by cytopia ( 891088 ) on Thursday June 30, 2005 @07:57AM (#12949385) Homepage
    Does anyone know how does google check for "fake" clicks?

    • Re:what exactly google does to stop fraud? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by -brazil- ( 111867 ) on Thursday June 30, 2005 @08:02AM (#12949420) Homepage
      I doubt they're telling anyone, since it would be easier for the fraudsters to circumvent the checks if they knew the exact method.

      The obvious measure would be statistical analysis to see whether some IP addresses are generating an excessive amount of clicks, especially on the same ads.
      • Probably but using the 95th percentile like some ISPs do to not charge for temporary spikes in bandwidth would knock out the 5% or less fake IP sources. Just don't count the top 5% IP sources. If they are legit they wouldn't be clicking on a banner that many times anyway. The 5% could be tweaked so nobody wig over it being too high ;)
      • somebody that has access to a large range of IPs could overcome an IP to Ad check I wonder whether they take into account clicks coming from same subnets/networks
        • Somebody with access to a large collection of zombie PCs wouldn't even all be coming from the same subnets/networks.

          I'd imagine that one trick to combat such would be to "rate" the attractiveness of the ad - i.e. Google staff acting as an "average Joe" looking at the ad and estimating how attractive it is as a guide to how often they'd expect it to be clicked. Any ad getting *much* higher traffic should be looked at more closely to see if: a) they underestimated it; b) it's a "click fraud" target.

    • AFAIK the only limit is 2 clicks per IP address per day, how exactly this is implemented, I do not know.

      They'll probably have some other stuff too, such as warnings when a specific add is getting an unexpected amount of hits within a certain time period or other such statistical markers, but this is just guessing.
    • Fairly hard problem to solve, but here's how I'd take a crack at it:
      • Look at subnets and IP ranges. Fairly simple one.
      • Look at click rates.
      • Look at keyword rates.
      • Look at search depth (front page vs 5 pages in).
      • I'd also have a few labs setup with infected PCs to see if there is anything going on by virus / hacked machines by monitoring all communications.

  • It's a funny old world, innit (Score:3, Informative)

    by Willeh ( 768540 ) * <rwillem@xs4all.nl> on Thursday June 30, 2005 @07:59AM (#12949394)
    Lemme get this straight, a maker of software that detects click fraud is sueing google for click fraud? This is either gonna make or break them, all off google's back. Looks like Google has got a hell of a hard time ahead, sitting on fat cash like they do.

    Otoh, this'll be even worse for google if Click defense manages to score a win in the courts.

    • Sneaky (Score:4, Insightful)

      by QMO ( 836285 ) on Thursday June 30, 2005 @08:07AM (#12949442) Homepage Journal
      IMO
      This is a publicity stunt.
      Click Defense is suing Google to get people to think about click fraud, so they'll buy software from Click Defense to save themselves.

    • Re:It's a funny old world, innit (Score:5, Insightful)

      by kebes ( 861706 ) on Thursday June 30, 2005 @08:28AM (#12949582) Journal
      I think the company in question, ClickDefense [clickdefense.com] must not be doing very well, and is using this as a last-resort money-grab to stay alive (wild speculation, I know!). Why do I say this? Well, it seems like corporate suicide for a company to admit that their product doesn't work at all. They are a company that sells click-fraud detection tools, so that other companies can prevent click-fraud and thereby increase their return-on-investment for all those advertising dollars.

      But if their product works properly, then they should be properly protected, and they wouldn't need to complain to Google that they are getting ripped off. They would just use this technology on themselves, and figure out a way to prevent this fraud (and then sell the technique to others of course). Part of this 'technique' might just be to accurately determine which advertising-supplier has the lowest fraud-rates, etc. But by telling google that they are getting frauded, they are basically admiting their system doesn't work.

      Of course, they will claim that they are using their technology to detect the fraud occuring on google's ads... this is, after all, the very point of their product, right? Then other people will buy their product. But 'going public' in this way doesn't make sense. If google cleans up their act in a public and verifiable way, then ClickDefense's product becomes irrelevant. Basically companies won't buy their product/services, because they will be happy knowing that Google is taking care of the situation. They don't need to pay ClickDefense for special knowledge about click-fraud: ClickDefense appears to be making this information public!

      If this is a publicity stunt, I think it is a bad one. Frankly it makes ClickDefense's product and services appear rather pointless. I question the long-term viability of this company!

  • Failing to prevent? (Score:4, Informative)

    by zensufi ( 743379 ) on Thursday June 30, 2005 @07:59AM (#12949397)

    In other news, Sears is being sued for failing to conduct background checks on the purchasers of air conditioners. It seems foreign assassins have been dropping them out of windows and killing unsuspecting Americans.

    Failing to prevent? I mean, come on. This only makes sense if Google signed a contract with the advertisers saying they would implement measures to prevent this.

  • 1-800 (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Matt Clare ( 692178 ) on Thursday June 30, 2005 @07:59AM (#12949398) Homepage
    I hope this company doesn't have a 1-800 number:

    "Ma' Bell didn't tell all the callers that they could only dial our number if they were going to buy something".
  • Im just trying to think what google could do beyond some of the obvious - Ignoring multiple clicks from same IP on same ad target.

    Any system is going to involve an element of fraud if there are human beings involved.
    • That's actually a pretty good point. In today's Web medium, there's a not-so-fine line between "advertising" and "bombardment", and it's pretty obvious now, after even grandmothers are talking about pop-up blockers, that a successful Web ad campaign should be pervasive, but without being plastered to every page that a person in my demographic is likely to view.

      That being said, as a consumer, I'm actually _less_ likely to click on an ad for a product that I'm not necessarily in awe of, but is still clutteri
    • What about proxies and NAT? One IP doesn't always equal one person (and vice versa, with dynamic IPs)

  • I'm confused... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by AnObfuscator ( 812343 ) <oneringNO@SPAMphys.ufl.edu> on Thursday June 30, 2005 @08:04AM (#12949426) Homepage

    ok, so based on the second link to the previous slashdot story (http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/04/19/1 927212&tid=123 [slashdot.org]), doesn't that prove in Google's favor that Google *is* taking click fraud seriously? Thus, doesn't that conclusively demonstrate in Google's favor that "Click Defense Inc." is just wrong?

    And their main product [clickdefense.com] is to prevent, you guessed it, Click Fraud. Hmmmm, a few minutes ago I didn't know that such a product existed, but now that they've sued google, I do. double hmmmm hmmmm.

    Some Executive somewhere: "Google is getting sued because they don't protect us from 'Click Fraud', whatever that is! that could cost us lots of money! What can I do to protect myself? Let me ask Google. Oh, look who is on the sponsored links, clickdefense.com. Oh, their product saves me! yay!"

    I smell a large omnivorous rodent of the genus Rattus [wikipedia.org]...

    • Both Google and Click Defense (RTFA) probably use a combination of IP addresses, cookies, time frames, and click patterns to guess whether the clicks are fraudulent or not. This dispute is probably over the gray areas.

      There's no doubt that someone clicking a dozen times on the same ad over the period of an hour should be backed out. But if a user clicks once on a particular ad today, then does it tomorrow, and the next day, is that click fraud? Google could argue no, the user is just looking to see if the

    • I wonder if the next step is suing Google if they let you run an ad that really sucks? Following a (somewhat) logical progression, what about suing if you link to a sucky site? Hell, why not just sue Google if they accept an ad from a company whose product or business plan sucks? Damn it Google, you guys should not have accepted my payments for my "All Pia - All The Time" Pia Zadora streaming site ads! You have a successful business - you should have known better. It's not like Click Fraud would have a reas

    • Re:I'm confused... (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Momoru ( 837801 )
      The motives of the company that is sueing them is questionable, but I think it is good in that it brings to light how common click-fraud is. Google may have had a token lawsuit or two, but their fundamental model is still flawed when it comes to preventing click fraud. Even their own CFO talks about how it is a real problem. Google can't solve the problem by suing people, and it is a real hassle to try to track down and report all the fraud to Google and hope for a credit. I think this is positive becau

  • IMHO (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Darth Maul ( 19860 ) on Thursday June 30, 2005 @08:08AM (#12949447)
    In my humble opinion, any lawsuit that has the words "failing to protect" in its description is automatically bunk.
    • I donno about that. A door knob that advertises security but fails to protect against someone turning it and opening the door, even while locked, is pretty valid. That's pretty gross negligence on that company's part, though.
    • This is a bunch of legal fees piling up. (Like SCO) Nobody's gonna get rich or right but the lawyers are gonna bill their clients per hour anyway.

      (Actually I wonder how many lawsuits are started by lawyers when they can find a gulible sucker?)

    • Re:IMHO (Score:2)

      by cduffy ( 652 )
      In my humble opinion, any lawsuit that has the words "failing to protect" in its description is automatically bunk.

      That's not always true. If you run a mall, a train station, or some other place that's open to the public and you have a wooden deck you don't keep maintained such that one of the boards rots and someone breaks an ankle falling through -- you had a legitimate duty to protect the public from reasonably forseeable safety hazards, and you're going to get to pay medical bills (and then some, mayb
    • Right on! You might as well try to sue the President for "failing to prevent terrorism", or Boeing for "failing to prevent people hijacking airplanes"...

  • Hmmm.... if my advertising is costing me money... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by utmslave ( 179598 ) on Thursday June 30, 2005 @08:10AM (#12949462)
    I change my advertising methods. If you bought a full page in the New York Times for advertisement and didn't see an increase in business that coincided with the amount you spent (assume that a rival company with deep pockets purchased about 100,000 subscriptions to the Times to inflate the ad placement cost), you would change your ad placement strategy. This is no different. If you want to sue someone, you need to sue the end-clicker that is causing the inflated ad cost or find another marketing plan.

    .sigs cause cancer!

  • Terms of Service (Score:3, Interesting)

    by robbway ( 200983 ) on Thursday June 30, 2005 @08:14AM (#12949488) Journal
    Perhaps they should read Google's TOS that prevents their liability for damages of any kind. Plus, if a company pays people to click their ads, they're the one committing the fraud and the only losers are the company itself and the IRS.

    The company is a loser because they paid money for an ad that no one but their own people see. They could have saved money by not purchasing the ad to begin with. The IRS loses taxes because the company is providing service to Google, and then from Google to itself, meaning about half of the transaction taxes evaporate.
    • The company is a loser because they paid money for an ad that no one but their own people see.

      It's worse than that, see. Let's say you hire people to click on your competitor's ads without buying their product -- and that these ads are on a website you own, so you get paid when folks click on them! You're draining your competitor's advertising budget, and enriching yourself.

    • Re:Terms of Service (Score:3, Informative)

      by mwvdlee ( 775178 )
      RTFA

      It's about people working for companies that click on banner adds of their COMPETITORS. You can do the rest of the math yourself.

      Not that it matters much, the whole case is pretty much moot anyway.
  • Marketeer #1: "We can't advertise new click fraud defense product on Google, it will cost us a fortune in click fraud."
    Marketeer #2: "Let's sue then. The case has no merit, but it will be cheaper than advertising on Google."

  • TOS problems (Score:5, Insightful)

    by frostman ( 302143 ) on Thursday June 30, 2005 @08:14AM (#12949493) Homepage Journal

    I'm not convinced Google is trying as hard as it should to combat click fraud, and I know how awful their customer service is, but...

    When you sign up for AdSense or AdWords, you do agree to their terms of service, including things like (paraphrasing here):

    • They pay you whatever they think is fair.
    • If they suspect fraud, they do whatever they like (including not paying you); if you suspect fraud, they'll "work with you" to investigate it.
    • On AdWords, you pay for whatever clicks they say you got.
    • On AdSense, they pay you for whatever clicks they say you got.
    • On AdSense, they can advertise their products on your site as much as they want, for free.
    • Their records are authoratitive (though largely secret), yours are corruptible (though possibly interesting).
    • Evil/fraud is what Sergey says is evil/fraud.
    • All your base yada yada...

    Seriously, Google ads have some great advantages on both sides, but if you go down that path you should not bet more money than you can easily afford to lose. You've basically agreed up front that they're always right - and yeah, maybe you can challenge that in court, but don't forget they have twenty lawyers for every click-fraud investigator. :-)

  • "Advertising companies rejoice as they win the Google Click Fraud lawsuit. Each class-action claimant gets $2; while the law firm who prosecuted this case gets $2.5 million"
  • Ok first off the company has no right to sue Google for said amount unless it can demonstrate the metrics to prove that it has had to pay Google approx. $5 million for "click fraud (of course that would mean that they have paid Google much more than that because not all clicks on their ads would be fraudulent...) Now that being said if the Company is just suing Google on the premise that it doesn't actively fight against click fraud vs actual damages it has occurred then that is just BS and they should coun
    • Two sides to this

      1. People ought to have fully understood what they were getting into.

      2. Google should protect people from rampant clickage.

      If an ad would normally get 1 click/day and all of a sudden got 200 or 200,000/day then you can say "wtf?".

      That being said most ads on google are tripe anyways. "Blowfish EncRyptor" my ass...

      Tom
  • ... if this suit has merit, but there is alot of click fraud that happens on google. It's been a long standing problem. Shrug.

  • Fake Chicks (Score:3, Funny)

    by jolyonr ( 560227 ) on Thursday June 30, 2005 @08:25AM (#12949555) Homepage
    I'm far more concerned about Fake Chicks that come up using Google Image search. Maybe we should sue.

  • I am safe from click fraud (Score:3, Funny)

    by Georules ( 655379 ) on Thursday June 30, 2005 @08:26AM (#12949556)
    with my Visa CapitalOne Check Card. It's in my wallet.
  • ..because all Google has to claim is that they take click fraud into account in their pricing.

    If the customer is already benefitting from reduced rates to compensate for a known issue, I don't see how a court could fairly award the complaintant.

    If googles customers want to pursue this, they will just force advertising rates higher, screwing no one but themselves. Especially, since google is under no onus of having to provide the same rates to all customers. They can impliment a "variable fee" for the

  • Got extortion? (Score:5, Funny)

    by raitchison ( 734047 ) <robert@aitchison.org> on Thursday June 30, 2005 @08:29AM (#12949586) Homepage Journal

    This seems like a rather obvious case of extortion if you ask me. I can picture the "negotiations" now.

    Click Defense: Buy our software

    Google: No thanks, we're good

    Click Defense: Buy it or we'll file a lawsuit and make lots of public statements saying you are allowing your customers to be ripped off (reminding them that people beleive anything they read on the IntArweb)

    Google: Pack Sand

    Click Defense: You'll regret this, it'll now cost you 10x as much as our shitty software

    Why don't we hold companies and individuals criminally resposible for this kinds of abuse of the legal system?

    • Well, sure. Or, you could go to Google right now, and search on "click fraud protection" and note the ads on the right. The ClickDefense.com ads are sort of begging for an expensive click, I'd say. All your ad budget is belong to us, etc. The point is, one click each from everyone on slashdot cannot be blocked by these clowns' own software, and that's exactly why their suit is nonsense anyway.

      • Interestingly, ClickDefense.com no longer seems to be showing up as a sposored link for that search.

        Could Google have removed the link to protect them from click fraud?

        • Actually, I saw them there just 10 minutes ago (um, and clicked, of course, because I was curious about their fine product - ads can be very helpful in connecting one to important vendors of high tech services, and... never mind).

          They've got to know that coverage of their silly suit is going to cause a lot of this sort of traffic, and they've probably set their AdWords daily spending limit low enough that it took them out of circulation for the day already, or put them way down in the bid list so they do
  • If some company employs people to artificially increase costs for their competitor, why aren't they the ones being sued?

  • I tried to give them some solutions (Score:3, Insightful)

    by tod_miller ( 792541 ) on Thursday June 30, 2005 @08:36AM (#12949629) Journal
    But they didn't seem to want to rock the boat of their solution.

    I once asked them, if I click 5 times on an ad, does that get charged 5 times? They said they couldn't say. All they have to do is stop charging someone for the same IP in the same day lets say.

    Sure, they would loose 15-20% (guesstimate) of clicks right? But wouldn't the service be better value therefore people would spend more?

    Thats all folks.
    • I once asked them, if I click 5 times on an ad, does that get charged 5 times? They said they couldn't say.

      They were being polite. I suspect that what they actually meant was something like this :

      We have our methods, thanks. We have absolutely nothing to gain and potentially a lot to lose by revealing them to a complete non-entity who isn't a customer and who probably couldn't even afford to put an ad in his local paper. Please go away before we invoice you for the 30 seconds of our time that you have ju
  • ...but come on! Why not sue your competitors directly for click-spamming, and put them out of business? Or could it be that your business is going nowhere because you're inept at running it, and you just want a free $5 million so you can close up shop?

    Maybe this was a publicity stunt, seeing as how all of the data you plan to present at trial is ostensibly derived from your own product, and you don't expect to win (except by perhaps being bought out by someone).

    Or maybe this was a scam from the start, a

  • Google is Public; Make Yourself Rich! (Score:5, Interesting)

    by qodfathr ( 255387 ) on Thursday June 30, 2005 @08:41AM (#12949654)
    Now that Google is public, I believe that Click Fraud will continue to increase. Think about it for a second:

    1. Buy Google stock.
    2. Perform random searches on Google.
    3. Click every ad.
    4. Google makes $$$ for those clicks.
    5. Stock price goes to $300, $400, ...
    6. Profit!

    It's hard to imaging any other company in which you can invest and, with so little effort, produce revenue for them. Hell, you could be doing something else at the same time! I bet while watching "Dancing with the Stars" you could flow several grand into Google's bank account. If even a small percentage of Google shareholders do the same, it's just like printing money.

  • Google does try hard... (Score:3, Informative)

    by Jay Maynard ( 54798 ) on Thursday June 30, 2005 @08:44AM (#12949674) Homepage
    ...they dropped Schlock Mercenary [schlockmercenary.com] from AdSense, they say, because of invalid clicks. Whether they're doing enough or not is, of course, open to dispute, but they do monitor clickthroughs.
  • Anybody can sue anybody for anything. That's easy. It's winning and collecting a judgement that is hard.

    I'm sure Google has a line item in their budget for legal defense against this sort of nonsense. That's the cost of doing business when you are a high profile and successful company.

  • A flawed business model (Score:5, Interesting)

    by erroneus ( 253617 ) on Thursday June 30, 2005 @09:18AM (#12949898) Homepage
    Counting clicks as a means of collecting revenue is a flawed business model. It sounds and seems more "precise" somehow, but as it has been pointed out, various forms of employment has actually arisen in low-income countries where people just come in and click away for cash. It's insane and more importantly, easily exploitable.

    Other advertising media use demographic polls to determine the approximate number of eyes and ears on their material. This is a fair means by which the value of advertising can be measured. It means the media will have to pay a reliable source to collect this information and all that but it's not as exploitable as hiring clickers in the 3rd world country to run up the advertising costs of a competitor.

    There's still room for fraud and falsification but the target for such accusation is much easier to define and because of this, they [the poll people] are more likely to protect themselves with auditing and tracking measures should they be accused of, say, siding with Yahoo! or Google when reporting numbers. It would more or less absolve the advertiser and the medium from this problem and actually simplifies the business model considerably.

    The internet advertisers should take a lesson from the rest of the world and simply go with what works. People will cheat every chance they get. It's clear and obvious. So you just have to find ways to reduce that risk.
  • Communism is grounded in the jealousy that unproductive losers feel towards those who are rewarded for making something that other people are willing to pay for.

    That is what is happening to Google now. They have built a successful business by creating something people voluntarily pay for in a free and open society. Now, the jealous nit wits who hate success are coming out of the woodwork to attack Google. I'd rather that these communists spent their energy creating rival competitive products in a free

  • Bunch of Ass Clowns (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Comatose51 ( 687974 ) on Thursday June 30, 2005 @09:20AM (#12949910) Homepage
    Have you guys read the site? These guys are a bunch of ass clowns.

    http://www.clickdefense.com/terms_of_services.html [clickdefense.com]

    "RISK. YOUR ACCOUNT AND THE SERVICE IS PROVIDED TO YOU ON AN "AS IS" AND "AS AVAILABLE" BASIS. Click Defense, ON BEHALF OF ITSELF AND ITS DISTRIBUTORS, ADVERTISERS AND SUPPLIERS, DISCLAIMS ALL WARRANTIES AND CONDITIONS, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, ARISING BY LAW OR OTHERWISE, WITH RESPECT TO YOUR ACCOUNT AND THE SERVICE (INCLUDING, WITHOUT LIMITATION, ANY IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NON-INFRINGEMENT)."

    First, you can't disclaim expressed warranties. Also kind of hypocritical that they disclaim all responsibility for their product and turns around and sue Googles for what amounts to a warranty issue.

    Very unprofessional. Obviously a bunch of dumbasses.
  • Google clearly states that you are in no way allowed to ask your users to click on the advertisements. Read the terms of any service which pays pr click or search, you fill not find any such service which does not have a huge legal terms of service document which forbids all kind of click fraud. If you do Click Fraud then you will be In Violation and you get No Money. The same applies to SPAM: Affiliates forbid it, so if you spam then they close your account and No Money for you. The secret organized click

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