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The issue with google ads is that it only takes one bad vistor to get your ad sense account disabled. Go ahead find a site with google ads start clicking the g

• zupreme 15y ago
  My assumption is that in 99% of the cases the revenue Google misses out on by terminating the accounts of site owners who experience the type of victimization is less than what they would spend in man-hours on investigating the matter to differentiate legitimate victimization from actual click-fraud.
• ktizo 15y ago
  Surely it cannot be that basic? If it is, then it would be relatively simple to automate this behaviour from a range of IPs and disable the accounts of hundreds, if not thousands of ad-sense customers.
  • zupreme 15y ago
    Actually, what you have proposed is exactly the approach that some black-hat practitioners have used to hide click-fraud. Some guys will setup a script to go to 5 sites (for example) and click ads on all of them. Their site will be one of the 5. All of the site owners make money, as do they, and because it's distributed across multiple sites, Google does not flag the activity as blatant click-fraud. If you spend any time a BHW you will see these schemes over and over again, along with people claiming to make hundreds of dollars per day "on autopilot"....
    • ktizo 15y ago
      That is similar, but I was meaning it less in terms of hiding click-fraud and more in terms of click-fraud-fraud, which would have a far more devastating effect on googles customers and if it was widespread enough would be horrendously bad for google as well.
      • redthrowaway 15y ago
        I'm not advocating anything illegal, but this might be just what it would take for Google to fix their policies. Scrape a few million sites with Adsense, rent a Russian botnet, and spam-click ads until Google takes notice.
        • shabble 15y ago
          semi-OT, but I've occasionally wondered if these botnets for hire actually come with any sort of term of use/AOP. Certain behaviours are more likely to get the individual zombies identified and potentially notified and cleaned up, so you'd think the botnet herders would try to minimise (or charge a much higher rate for) those sorts of activities. I'm also curious how actually deploying to a rented/borrowed botnet is done - what's stopping the client from using a payload which nukes and replaces the controller with one of their own, stealing it from the owner?
          • tlrobinson 15y ago
            I don't know for sure, but perhaps the botnet provides higher level abstractions (DDoS, spam mailer, click bots, etc), or a sandboxed environment. "Heroku for botnets".
        • VMG 15y ago
          But what should they do? I don't really see an easy solution to this problem.
          • redthrowaway 15y ago
            Not a clue, but Google's got enough of a braintrust to figure it out. They deal with SERP spammers fairly well; they can deal with clickfraud as well without punishing innocent people and not giving them a chance to fix it.
        • ktizo 15y ago
          In about 6 months, that is going to be Yahoo's new business plan, once they realise that suing facebook doesn't count as an industry in and of itself.