unless you're talking about really sophisticated fraud, i think advertisers and publishers both care about it. I'm on both sides of the coin. As an advertiser

unless you're talking about really sophisticated fraud, i think advertisers and publishers both care about it. I'm on both sides of the coin. As an advertiser, click fraud is obvious when I see a huge disparity between google analytics and the ad network. You'd have to put a lot of effort into sending fake traffic that actually engages with the advertiser's landing page. As a publisher, I know that if I send a bunch of BS traffic to my advertisers they will blacklist me and starve my website. Regarding your estimates, I agree for really broad traffic. If your targeting options are very vague/loose you can buy ad traffic for very cheap, but you end up with a large number of click fraud. Most advertisers should want to be as narrow as possible with their targeting. The tricky thing is that when everyone is bidding on the golden goose egg demographics the price jumps quickly. In some cases, you're better off buying the 'general audience' traffic for pennies just because of sheer volume multiplied by chance.