My fellow Webmasterworld member JenStar runs the best known AdSense site that I know of. Here is an inspirational interview with the man who has over 80 blogs and makes over $1M a year from AdSense. He has 9 staff and over 100 blog writers…

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This article by Joseph Tierney is different from the usual rehash of how click fraud is perpetrated. Many sites have reprinted this article and it is worth reading to see a fresh dissection of the typical AdSense ad and how it is easy for the knowledgeable culprits to get past Google’s click fraud detection service.

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(Extract)

TEXARKANA, Ark. (AP) – A federal appeals court says a class-action lawsuit alleging “click fraud” by Google Inc. and other Internet companies should be heard in state court rather than in a federal courtroom.

I don’t know much about the US legal system, but wouldn’t it make life easier for all concerned if there was one ruling that applied to all of the US?

More from law.com

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You might not think this is funny. When I was in high school I used to read about these bad guys called the Viet Cong (VC). While searching for occurrences of “click fraud”, I found this post called A VC: Internet Axis of Evil (continued) where a VC named Fred Wilson lists Click Fraud as one of the Internet Axis of Evil. Now I don’t live and breathe the jargon of the Valley, since I live in Melbourne, Oz. So it took a few seconds to register that Fred wasn’t the kind of VC that I instinctively think of.

It is reassuring to see a growing awareness of this problem but this awareness is minuscule. Taking the world of PPC advertisers, I suspect that the majority is not even aware of the problem. My day job involves running a department that sells search engine marketing services to the SME sector. Many say to my staff, “I am wasting $xxxx on Overture/Google/whatever” – either they don’t know how to write ads or to bid wisely, or they have experienced click fraud – or all the above.

Then there is the sceptical segment that says, “Yes, it has got to exist but is it really a problem?”. This segment can be turned into true believers if only they found a way to track their clicks. I hang out (when visiting the US or online) with some of the identities at Webmasterworld and many of them make tidy sums in the affiliate marketing game. Some use PPC ads to drive traffic. With 1-2 exceptions, the rest are singularly not interested in the click fraud problem. This ostrich mentality is troubling.

The final segment includes our friendly VC in New York, John Battelle, a few others, and me. Perhaps you too. Please comment on why don’t PPC advertisers want to know about click fraud.

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Our research indicates that as much as 30% of paid search traffic may be fraudulent.

This site requires free registration to view the material.

One of their experiments was to place an ad on a contrived phrase (click fraud spelt backwards) and they clicked the AdWord repeatedly. Their findings agree with mine that clicking one ad repeatedly will either not register at all in Google, or at worst you will be charged for only one click.

Clicks made from a sophisticated adversary are a totally different matter.

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I also track my sites with VeriClix, a free service. Someone’s clock is out of sync, because the visit from the Comcast subscriber shows only once at Vericlix, but a few minutes out, so I cannot say which of the four clicks it is.

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