Disclosure: I used to work on the pipelines counting this stuff at Google. > What? They get paid for the clicks, not the impressions. Serving ad impressions co

Disclosure: I used to work on the pipelines counting this stuff at Google. > What? They get paid for the clicks, not the impressions. Serving ad impressions costs money, the clicks make money. I don't quite follow your line of reasoning here. Google has display ads (nee double-click) and search ads (adwords). Display ads can be pay per click or pay per impression (https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/2454058?hl=en https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/2454058?hl=en). Search ads are pay per click. > Why wouldn't it? How do we know the bidding process is fair and the clicks we're paying for are valid? We don't and that's the problem. We wouldn't tolerate this type of behavior from companies in other industries. We need to quit giving tech companies a free pass and start holding them accountable. For cost per click there's an economic argument that the auction is fair. Google has limited ad slots and leaves money on the table if it serves low bid or low quality ads instead of higher-bid or higher-quality ads, and if Google pretended low-quality ads were high quality the advertiser would see it as an insanely high cost per conversion. Click validity is also easy to measure; count how many clicks you're charged for and compare that with how many referrals with gclid from google.com show up in your logs (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/35813737/matching-google-adwords-referrer-url https://stackoverflow.com/questions/35813737/matching-google...). Impression ads are trickier which is why there are fancy cross-device conversion/attribution metrics to correlate purchases with impressions, but ultimately that is the problem with pay-per-impression in general. > It only has to be good enough to convince people to keep using it. There's no financial incentive to eliminate fraud completely, or even try, without regulation. Here I mostly agree; I was pretty disappointed to find out Google was serving those stupid "Download Now"-button ads on various software distribution sites. I think that particular insanity has been fixed now, but "not against the rules" was the answer for most of the time I was there. Trust is also a financial incentive and is the primary incentive to prevent outright fraud. Ad-blockers or moving to another ad network are the proper responses to indicate lowered trust.