eMarketer cites a company that is offering a $495, 27-page report on how much money is being lost to click fraud. I think there is money to be made is by writing about the click fraud threat. Now why didn’t I think of that?
At least we agree that there is growing apathy towards CF in advertiser land.
Bruce Schneier has discovered two of the four or five kinds of click fraud as seen in this YAOAACF (Yet Another Obligatory Article About Click Fraud). Nothing new there, but he mentions fraud in online gaming activities and cost-per-action (CPA) ads.
Ah well, that should fulfil July’s quota of click fraud articles.
I haven’t seen any life at Zeezo.com in over a year. Submissions seem to drop into /dev/null. Around 2003 a single submission there would be multiplied over 100 times (once per country), giving you a lot of links from different subdomains. While that isn’t necessarily a good thing, it was better than dropping into /dev/null.
Cipinet has very few entries in it and has not shown any of my submissions, so is therefore not worth the time and effort to submit.
Last year I asked what do you give a person who has everything, and proceeded to describe the Swissbit Swissmemory USB Victorinox – a flash drive inside a Swiss Army Knife (SAK). One year down the track, you can buy this person the Swissbit S.Beat MP3.
As you might have guessed, this is another Victorinox SAK, but with a beefed-up USB flash drive that also features an MP3 player. I have bought at least two MP3 players a year and in my children’s hands none of them survives the year. They tend to be dropped, fried or otherwise rendered unusable. At the Las Vegas Showstoppers event run by Steve Leon I reacquainted myself with the Swissbeat representatives who kindly provided a unit for review.
Choosing an MP3 Player
Typical concerns when choosing portable audio players include the charging technique. Some make you supply your own battery, either disposable or rechargeable. Rechargeable is obviously the better approach, but here your choices are between an external charger (typically one or more AAA batteries) or an internal one. You might ask whether an internal battery could be replaced, but I suspect that you will be using a newer player by then.
You also need to consider how the device will connect to a computer, since this is the most likely source of updating its content. If the device has a USB Flash drive form factor, you just plug it into the PC or a hub; else you will need a special cable with a USB connector at one end.
The Swiss Army Knife now includes an MP3 player, voice recorder and FM radio. The player is also available without tools for use by frequent air travellers. Thanks to brilliant marketing, the Apple iPod slugs you more money for items that other manufacturers include in their players. These include an FM tuner, a voice recorder, USB charger, and so on. You could argue that you shouldn’t pay for things you don’t need, but some of these competitive offerings end up cheaper than the base iPod.
Do you need a voice recorder? If you are a journalist, you would want a dedicated recorder but for most of us the need could be unpredictable. Perhaps you want to record the voice of an aged relative when you visit them, or some other sound snippet to send with an email? Similarly, an FM radio tuner is handy when you are in a new city and need to check a weather forecast or sample the local music? Let’s get back to the S.Beat MP3.
What about the display? Large players have a large screen, increasingly in colour, to display the menu, song or video selections and playback. For audio-only players, a small display that shows the menus and name of the tune is necessary.
Features
Audio formats supported include MP3, Windows WMA (8-320 Kbit/s), and OGG Vorbis. It records from line-in, FM tuner and the microphone in WAV format (8-48 Kbit/s). There are six equaliser modes: Normal, Jazz, Classic, Rock, Blues and Pop.
Its 1 GB Flash memory can be used for audio and data storage thanks to the USB form factor. You can store about 250 music files, depending on quality settings and duration.
The remote control is cleverly engineered into the Victorinox logo shape by making the cross a four-way joystick. I found the tiny joystick on the player sufficient for my needs, as I didn’t want too many appendages on my chest. Others who place the player in their handbag or on the arm-strap will find it useful.
The FM radio has 15 presets, so you can find your favourite stations without having to search for them. You can record from the radio.
The 3-line display with a blue backlight is quite legible. It shows the modes of operation and information about the file or radio station being played. The menu can be displayed in one of five languages: English, German, French, Italian or Spanish.
The built-in Lithium Polymer battery can be charged by simply plugging the device into a USB outlet. The traveller model comes with a multiple-voltage, multiple-pin power adapter that has a USB outlet. For a traveller without a portable computer, this is a great way to charge the player. The same adapter can be used to connect your other small appliances to a foreign power outlet. How clever of Swissbeat to think of a traveller’s other appliances! The tools include scissors, pen knife, screw driver and nail file. You are warned not to leave the player in the knife housing when cutting fruit that has a lot of acidic juice. Sensible advice.
In Use
The MP3 sound quality, volume and earphone fit were excellent. The voice recorder was quite sensitive and would meet the needs of, say, an interview. I didn’t get a chance to see how it would do in a large conference room.
I used Windows Media Player to manage the transfer of songs to the device and had no problems with this simple technique. I don’t like loading my PC with applications, so in a way I was grateful that the S.beat MP3 player didn’t want to install yet another media manager program.
I like to listen to the radio during my 2 km walk from my car park to my office but found that the FM radio is not very sensitive. It had no problem picking up the powerhouse stations such as the ABC, but my favourite, Gold FM gave poor reception from the city centre. When the S.beat MP3 is not carried with the tools, a small plastic cap protects the USB connector.
I leave the knife at home as it adds 40 g to the unit’s 32 g weight. A small cap protects the USB connector and also serves to anchor the earpiece and neck strap. While travelling, the knife stays in the checked luggage.
Overall, this is a reasonably priced MP3 player in a compact, lightweight package. You could spend a lot more and get less features with some other offerings.
Availability
The S.Beat MP3 with 1 GB capacity can be bought online from http://www.swissbit-shop.com for US$197.25. With a travel charger, it costs US$237.75. 2 GB and 4 GB models will be available by the time you read this. You can also buy a version minus the tools for use on aircraft at a slightly cheaper price.
MSN Search’s WebLog : Opting Out of Open Directory Listings for Webmasters: <meta name=”ROBOTS” content=”NOODP”> is the magic meta tag you can place in your index page to be freed of the ODP description if you don’t like it. It is proprietary to MSN Search but it is not worth it, at least for me.
I dropped from #1 to #6 after adding the tag.
There might be others like this, but here is a great list of free and paid directories that lets you view the data from several angles. There are mini reviews of each entry.
McAfee QuickClean (QC) is a simple utility that benefits your PC’s performance. QC achieves this by identifying and safely removing unused, redundant, and unwanted files, folders, shortcuts, and temporary files that accumulate over time. These days PCs come with large hard disks, typically well over 120 MB, sometimes over 200 MB. An unfortunate (or fortunate, depending on your point of view) consequence is that potentially 10 percent of the space is reserved for debris such as deleted files, cache files, temporary files and so on.
If you have sensitive personal and financial information that you need to delete before unwanted eyes can get to it, McAfee Shredder offers secure file erasing features. If you are concerned about your Web surfing history, QC’s privacy controls help remove it and recently accessed files created with Microsoft Office. QC also provides e-mail cleanup support for Microsoft Outlook, Outlook Express and other MAPI-compliant e-mail programs.
In Use
QC first compiles a list of folders on your PC and marks them as ones whose contents will never be deleted. This activity can take a long time, depending on the size of your hard disk and the number of files. They are designated as Protected Folders. You can modify this at a later date.
I keep my PC fairly clean and have set low upper limits for the Recycle Bin, so I recovered only about 128 MB, mainly from the browser cache. As QC does its job very quickly and thoroughly there isn’t a lot one can say except that it certain does what it claims. I could not find the 2006 version in Australia, but it is available from http://us.mcafee.com/root/store.asp for US$30 for download.
I was privileged to meet and listen to Ben Edelman at the Affiliate Summit in Las Vegas in January 2006. His presentations are technical – where the audience needs to know what is a packet sniffer, for example. His recent report has made small waves in various online communities. He accuses Yahoo of being complicit in syndicated click fraud. He says:
In my August syndication fraud examples, an advertiser only pays Yahoo if a user clicks the advertiser’s ad. Not so for three of today’s examples. Here, spyware completely fakes a click — causing Yahoo to charge an advertiser a “pay-per-click” fee, even though no user actually clicked on any pay-per-click link. This is “click fraud.”
This document offer four fully-documented examples of improper ad displays (1, 2, 3, 4), including three separate examples showing click fraud. I then develop a taxonomy of the problem and suggest strategies for improvement.
Ben shows [quote]”video, screenshot, and packet log proof of how spyware vendors and advertisement syndicators defraud Yahoo’s advertisers”.[unquote]
Rivetting reading!
Leslie Walker reported in the Washington Post last month:
Google has repeatedly pooh-poohed click fraud, contending that it is a minor annoyance that it has under control with automated detection technology. At a meeting with analysts two weeks ago, chief executive Eric Schmidt said click fraud “is not a material issue.” Co-founder Sergey Brin said such cases amount to “a small fraction” of Google’s ad clicks.
But six days later, Google surprised analysts when it agreed to settle an Arkansas class-action lawsuit by setting aside $90 million worth of ad credits to advertisers that can show invalid click charges dating to 2002.
The article is about Radiator.com whose click fraud auditor [quote] “ClickFacts Inc. estimated that 35 percent of the referrals that Radiator paid Google for stemmed from bogus traffic. Likewise, 17 percent of the leads that came from Yahoo search results were illegitimate.” [unquote]
As reported in previous posts, click fraud thrives, as seen in the projects commissioned at the freelance sites, and it was probably very easy to perpetrate back in 2002. I look forward to hearing more reports of how bad it is in 2006. Would any click fraudsters care to comment?
Jason Lee Miller has written an interesting article in WebProNews as a follow up to the class-action lawsuit filed by Lane’s Gifts and Collectibles in Arkansas against Google. The plaintiffs’ lawyers will apparently receive $30M! The preliminary settlement awards advertisers covered by the suit just 0.5%.
Submissions made in May 2005 are still not showing, so it seems pointless to fill out a free submission to Entireweb. Of course, their paid service works fine on Entireweb itself, although its “partners” display such listings because they are metasearch engines and they would have picked up one’s submissions elsewhere anyhow.