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!
eWhisper posted some insider info about YSM over at WMW, but the thread requires a membership. So go to his site for read about it for free.
A quick summary is that they are planning on doing a massive overhaul of their existing system that has not changed in years.
Here are the main things that will change:
This is great and should be helpful to anyone using the system, especially those trying to exploit it (c:
Now if they would only kill some partner relationships like the douchebags who run searchnut.com. Thanks for 30x the traffic of yahoo itself!
An interesting email arrived from Yahoo! today stating that I could easily import settings from an US Yahoo! Search Marketing (overture) account to a UK overture account.
We’ve made it easy for you to set up a new UK account. By creating a sub-account that sits conveniently within your existing account, there is no need to re-enter information we already have collected. Simply visit the link below and fill out the registration form. A UK client services representative will contact you via email with more instructions and account setup confirmation.
This is obviously not a full blown roll out of Panama but it is a huge step forward for Yahoo! to bring their PPC accounts into ONE centralized company, VS having to have 10 accounts at separate Yahoo/Overture sites to handle 10 different countries.
The signup page is located here, and states:
Start your UK sub-account
Setting up a sub-account is easy and you can simply transfer your existing listings to your new UK account. Just fill out and submit the sub-account request form below, and you’ll be contacted via email by our UK Client Services team for account set-up confirmation.
I am not sure if anyone has tried this yet, but it is a step in the right direction in my opinion and would love to hear your feedback on how it works.
Oh Snap! It seems like the shit may have hit the fan a bit for YSM / Overture today. Apparently there is a class action lawsuit that has been filled against Yahoo for participating in click fraud. I found the article in the Washington post by the way of webmaster world.
An interesting point in the article is that it seems like Yahoo would poor on the clicks when their quarterly reporting was due, which is a brilliant strategy by them…but shady as hell. It will be interesting to see how this pans out. Advertisers have been bitching for as long as I can remember about how crappy the traffic is from Yahoo and that it has only gotten worse as time goes on.
Numerous complaints about pay per click arbitrage as well as one page domain landers have been posted all up and down the overture forum at WMW. About a week or so some dude put out some 10 minute long video documenting how wrong all this stuff is…found here at youtube.com.
The funniest thing is that GrayWolf put out a how to article (actually a series) on how to do pay per click arbitrage on his blog in a three part series. I, II, III
So there you have both sides of the fence…those complaining about the practice, and those showing you how to do it. What are your thoughts on this whole mess? How do you think this will affect the future of the pay per click market and what do the engines need to do in order to stop this?
Welcome to pay per click blog, a resource for news, reviews, tips and pointers for the various pay per click search engines.
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