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Wednesday, October 20, 2004
It's official: click fraud is now a "scourge". Of course it exists, but the extent of the problem is being blown out of proportion. It's easy to see why. When you're busy building campaigns, you don't have time to fixate on issues like this. You take care of a lot of annoying problems and roadblocks in the process of building something that works. When it's your job to write about business, on the other hand, you can skim the surface and refer generally to trends, unwittingly magnifying their importance to the casual observer.
The level of outrage that companies are spending "tens of millions of dollars on customers that don't exist" is something to behold, especially given the long history of advertising methods which are completely unverifiable. What about those piles of free newspapers you see in lobbies? Might those be added to "circulation" figures? Are people really watching TV ads nowadays? How can we be sure?
I'm going to start a new service (let's call it AdNazi) designed to put a stop to all this "attention fraud." When one of my AdNazi(TM) spies catches a motorist not eyeing a certain billboard with interest, we'll force them off the road and scream: "Look!!!!!"
We at AdNazi(TM) feel your pain. Attention fraud is costing America's corporations billions of dollars. It must be stopped.
Malicious and fake clicks are indeed fraudulent, and their perpetrators ought to be jailed. But let's not be too amazed by the notion that advertisers are flushing a lot of money down the toilet on methodologies that might not be 100% bulletproof. Next to "shooter girls" offering test tubes of colored liquid to already-inebriated males in dimly-lit clubs, paid search advertising is the most trackable, targeted form of marketing ever invented.
Posted by
Andrew Goodman
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