Online Advertising Survival: Combating Click Fraud - University of ...

click fraud did so in the belief they were helping the very same people whose advertisingdollars they were depleting, because clicking on their ads made their Web sites morepopular.To show how prevalent this practice is, type in “earn money” + “click” in Google and679,000 results are found. Research has shown that click fraud originating from foreigncountries such as China, Turkey and India are on the decline due to better filtering oftraffic by the search engines. At the same time, the perpetrators have become morecreative to cheat the system closer to home with Paid to Read schemes.7.3 Paid to ReadThe growing trend in click fraud is in the form of Paid to Read that targets both pay perclick and impression based advertising. The scam usually targets stay at home workersand low income individuals. The perpetrators aggressively entice these individuals toview and click ads sent to them by email. Workers make very nominal sums of moneyand in many cases, often go unpaid. Not only are the advertisers victims of click fraud,so are the unsuspecting public.7.4 Competitor SabotageSome unethical companies click on the pay per click ads of competitors to drive up theiradvertising costs. The intention is to max out the competitor’s advertising budget.Advertisers usually set daily limits on how much they will spend and search engines willdrop their advertisements once they hit that limit. Once the competitor’s budget is19