I wouldn't be surprised if this particular revenue stream plunged. Or else, some adjustments to the model will have to occur.
Web Marketers Fearful of Fraud in Pay-Per-Click:
Businesses that pay Google and Overture to steer customers to their Web sites are questioning how much fraud lurks in the blossoming pay-per-click model of advertising.
There is evidence that at least some scammers are clicking away at the ads, or having programs called hitbots or clickbots do it for them, with the knowledge that each click costs an advertiser money. Some of the troublemakers are disgruntled employees; some are companies trying to force competitors' ad spending up; some are even Web page operators who let search engines deliver ads to their sites and then collect a cut when people click on those ads.The company, which has been advertising its site, www.speedreg.co.uk, on Overture since August, saw daily traffic from its keyword ads abruptly triple, from 400, for five days last October, said Des Elton, managing director. “We averaged 1,200 clicks a day, costing us £950 on average every day,” or about $1,800, he said. “We'd been up to £450 to £500 before, but that was the extreme case.”
The sudden boom in site traffic would have been welcome if it had produced increased sales, but conversions from clicks to sales actually plunged, Mr. Elton said. The company reported its suspicions to Overture in early November; three weeks later it collected a refund of £2,519.88 (about $4,800).
Mr. Elton said he remained dissatisfied with having to depend on search engines to make things right. “As of the present time, they are judge and jury on any suspect click fraud case such as ours,” he said. “I believe there should be an unbiased independent arbitration by a separate specialist company. In other words, Overture should not be solely investigating click fraud on our behalf.”
Jessie C. Stricchiola, the president of Alchemist Media and one of the first to examine click fraud, said yesterday that click fraud, was “a problem for advertisers.” Ms. Stricchiola was on a panel discussing click fraud yesterday as part of the Search Engine Strategies Conference and Expo this week in New York.
A tangle of conflicting interests makes it hard to straighten out or even quantify the click fraud problem, Ms. Stricchiola and other panelists said. Google, Overture and the other search companies describe their fraud-prevention and detection programs only vaguely, explaining that scammers could use the details to cheat the system more effectively.
