From the monthly archives:

September 2006

Ask.com - Worthless PPC Advertising Buy

by Werty on September 25, 2006

This is my first tip on the site: DO NOT USE ASK.com FOR PPC, unless you are only selling clicks…

Background: I signed up with an Ask Jeeves Advertising account yesterday and experienced a massive amount of worthless traffic that was not even clicking my links once it reached my site. After finding out about this I wrote a nice little email to ASK.com explaining the situation. I am kind of upset that I forgot to tell Barry Diller to eat a dick in the email.

Here is the email:

Hello, I signed up with ASK last night (account # 490588) and managed to use almost half of my deposit (around 50 of my $100) in under a few hours. Also my daily budget of $10 was exceeded on both days.

In addition to that I am getting ONLY clickbot traffic from your network of sites, which I did not opt in to including these sources:

http://6161.partners.findology.com/2.php
http://www.unitedsearchnetwork.com
http://feed.genieknows.com/yz/search_html.jsp
http://suzako.com/other.php
http://6678-59069_2559710.partners.findology.com/2.php
http://6679-59131_2596293.partners.findology.com/2.php
http://6678-59069_2577094.partners.findology.com/2.php
http://6678-59647_2597279.partners.findology.com/2.php
http://6678-59069_2559717.partners.findology.com/2.php
http://www.bestohyes.com/search/
http://6678-59844_2597280.partners.findology.com/2.php
http://www.findaccurate.com/pro.php
http://www.2005.com/search/
http://6453.partners.findology.com/2.php
http://6678-58768_2579356.partners.findology.com/2.php
http://6678-60689_2592612.partners.findology.com/2.php
http://www.searchfeed.com/rd/Clk.jsp
http://dpxml.verizon.net/_1_2DH7U4H0LYLJ3K__vzn.isp/search/web/n

http://6678-59895_2604160.partners.findology.com/2.php
http://6106-b2001.partners.findology.com/2.php
http://www.searchcreep.com/results.php
http://6678-59647_2597286.partners.findology.com/2.php
http://6678-59780_2576412.partners.findology.com/2.php
http://6679-59131_2561197.partners.findology.com/2.php
http://6679-61013_2614426.pa
rtners.findology.com/2.php
http://6916-175.partners.findology.com/2.php
http://6107-b2001.partners.findology.com/2.php

At this point you have 2 choices;

1. refund our money for this worthless traffic, opt us out of your “partners” and only show our ads on ASK.com

2. cancel our account, refund the remainder of the money in the account and face a chargeback on the previous charges.

I would also like to be assured that you will not be automatically rebilling my account when the budget is low.

Regards,
George Kepnick

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Click Fraud on Google and Yahoo

by Werty on September 25, 2006

This is one the best articles I have read about the subject of click fraud.

Business Week - The Dark Side of PPC

Finally someone digs into the numbers and gives examples of how a Paid To Read click ring works.

This is also a reason why MSFT does not have click fraud issues at the moment, however they are about to start whoring out their network with an AdSense type of program it sounds like. Don’t do it MSFT!

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