Yikes! How does Google (and others) respond to these attacks? If continued unabated, this whole mode of advertising will collapse (and there will go my $.24 per diem!)
MSNBC - When Mice Attack :
Nehoray found that his site was getting lots of new visitors but unusually few paying customers. Nehoray (who prefers we don't name his company) analyzed his Internet logs and made an unsettling discovery. Someone—perhaps a competitor—had written a simple software program that relentlessly clicked on his ads, burning up his ad budget and pushing his links off the search sites by lunchtime each day. After spending weeks complaining to Google about the problem and getting a partial refund, he finally yanked the ads. “It was really bad,” he says, estimating that he lost $50,000 in potential business. “Nobody knows how to solve this problem.”
... Last month Google CFO George Reyes conceded that click fraud was a significant threat to his firm's burgeoning bottom line. “I think something has to be done about this really, really quickly, because I think, potentially, it threatens our business model,” he told an investors' conference.
hat tip to David Pogue for the link
