Today’s deadtree edition of the Wall Street Journal has an article on click fraud that caught my eye immediately. As a Google AdSense affiliate, I take click fraud personally.
My business model currently contains nine revenue streams to generate income online. I am always watching for another revenue stream to add to the mix, and tracking the contributions of what’s already in the mix. Currently, AdSense is contributing a respectable 7% of my total income so far this year.
So you can bet that I sat straight in my chair, gestured wildly and spoke colorfully when I read this near the end of the article:
Some experts say the best way to fight click fraud is to avoid advertising where it tends to happen most. That, they say, means listing ads only on search engines, and not on third-party ad networks like Google’s popular AdSense, which allows external sites to host ads and share profits. They say a third-party site can be driven by greed to use a software program or pay cheap labor in developing nations to repeatedly click on ads in order to get more commissions from clicks.
“Generally, where we see a high volume of click fraud is not [in] Google directly but those other affiliates,” says Jim Collins, chief executive of Affinity Internet, a Fort Lauderdale, Fla., firm that advises small businesses on ad campaigns.
Gah! Don’t shoot the geese because a weasel has snuck into the flock! Go after the weasel, for crying out loud.
Then this:
Google says that there’s no greater chance of fraud if your ad runs on a third-party site, and that if anything, a small-business owner might lose out on valuable exposure. “Making decisions about where to invest your advertising dollars out of fear is not the best way to set up your campaign,” says Mr. Ghosemajumdir [Google’s manager for trust and safety].
The discussion of per-per-click reminded me of one of my other revenue streams, Commission Junction. The advertisers there are allowed quite a bit of variety in defining how they’ll pay for traffic from ads displayed by Commission Junction member sites. I would guess that most of the advertisers don’t follow the pay-per-click model, but favor instead a pay-per-lead or pay-per-sale model. That results in fewer payouts, but at a higher amount.
The WSJ article went on:
Other experts, meantime, point to potential new advertising pricing models that may make it harder to commit click fraud in the first place. Search engines are studying one method, called cost-per-action advertising, where an advertiser pays only when a click-through leads to a product purchase or sales lead.
The articles closes with Mr. Ghosemajumdir saying that Google is looking at providing cost-per-action as an alternative to its advertisers.
As a non-fraudulent AdSense affiliate, let me urge all you small-business folk out there to continue using AdSense — and keep an eye on those logs! And let me urge the search-engine folks onward in their efforts to curtail click fraud — I take that sort of thing personally because the frauds are fouling the waters for everyone.
Meantime, if anyone out there has any ideas on new sorts of revenue streams, I’m all ears.
Now, off-topic but important:
You are invited to visit the CoHR, Christmas shopping edition. “CoHR” is the Carnival of Hurricane Relief, a grassroots online effort to maintain awareness of the Gulf Coast as its people work towards recovery from the 2005 hurricane season.
If you are shopping for Christmas, you are encouraged to find one item from your Christmas list from among the items and services available from Gulf Coast individuals, small businesses and non-profits — not just through CoHR.
Every purchase acts as an economic multiplier to aid in the Gulf Coast’s recovery. Every purchase helps firm the ground so that the Guld Coast can stand on its own again.
