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I'm not sure why the criminals are bothering. AdSense clicks earn almost nothing in my experience. I guess they could be making money by charging businesses to

I'm not sure why the criminals are bothering. AdSense clicks earn almost nothing in my experience. I guess they could be making money by charging businesses to click on their competitors' ads and drain their budgets, but there are only so many companies that are willing to pay to engage in clearly illegal activity like that. The primary beneficiary of the fraudulent clicks that are good enough to evade Google's detection is....Google.

sanswork 11y ago
Adsense might not pay a lot for most things but there are still a lot of high paying keywords you can target and certainly enough money to be made to draw out bad actors.
- Scoundreller 11y ago
  Yep. I've built admittedly high-margin and low-volume sites, but I've averaged about $0.75/click on Adsense for several years. I haven't even done any A/B testing either. Now if I could only ratchet up the volume...
ISL 11y ago
Not in the long run. If Google ad customers aren't seeing value for their ad spend, they'll take their dollars elsewhere.
- Scoundreller 11y ago
  I'm not so sure. I always figured the cost per click would drop accordingly. If fraud is 50%, advertisers would only bid 50% for a click/impression, and it would be a wash in the end for the advertiser and Google. I think the real hit is against content creators who aren't able to extract the full value of their work, instead they split the revenue pool with a bunch of adspam sites.
  - antsar 11y ago
    Couldn't Google keep cost-per-click artificially high, benefiting themselves at the expense of advertisers?
    - Scoundreller 11y ago
      I think they're too ethical and just charge whatever their auction system calculates. Google wants advertisers to be sustainable, not bankrupt them as soon as possible.
cldellow 11y ago
Your experience is not universal. :) There are ways to make clicks worth more. Be from a US IP address. Stuff your browser with retargeting cookies by visiting high-value brand sites (e.g. car manufacturers, insurance websites, loan products, ecommerce stores). I've worked on the network side of ad ops and seen fraud. Amateur, easily detected and squelched fraud. It amounted to several thousand dollars a day. If you were the right combination of talented and not-overly-greedy, you could make a comfortable living by doing this fraudulently. > The primary beneficiary of the fraudulent clicks that are good enough to evade Google's detection is....Google. The primary beneficiary is the person getting the lion's share of the ad dollar, which often isn't Google. Don't get me wrong, Google has some perverse incentives here, too, but I suspect they'd be way more happy with a 0% fraud world than with the status quo.
- Nitramp 11y ago
  If you don't provide value to your customers (Advertisers) due to fraudulent clicks, ultimately your product is less valuable, and you make less money. I think Google's incentives are alright here.
asdf99 11y ago
see the big picture. every ad networks have fraud. fraud causes ctr to not equal advertiser profit. advertiser pays less and less for ads that do not create profit. you get less and less for your site. fraudsters get more bots and keep their earning stable while prices goes down. back to step one

sanswork 11y ago

Adsense might not pay a lot for most things but there are still a lot of high paying keywords you can target and certainly enough money to be made to draw out bad actors.

Scoundreller 11y ago
Yep. I've built admittedly high-margin and low-volume sites, but I've averaged about $0.75/click on Adsense for several years. I haven't even done any A/B testing either. Now if I could only ratchet up the volume...

ISL 11y ago

Not in the long run. If Google ad customers aren't seeing value for their ad spend, they'll take their dollars elsewhere.

Scoundreller 11y ago
I'm not so sure. I always figured the cost per click would drop accordingly. If fraud is 50%, advertisers would only bid 50% for a click/impression, and it would be a wash in the end for the advertiser and Google. I think the real hit is against content creators who aren't able to extract the full value of their work, instead they split the revenue pool with a bunch of adspam sites.
- antsar 11y ago
  Couldn't Google keep cost-per-click artificially high, benefiting themselves at the expense of advertisers?
  - Scoundreller 11y ago
    I think they're too ethical and just charge whatever their auction system calculates. Google wants advertisers to be sustainable, not bankrupt them as soon as possible.

cldellow 11y ago

Your experience is not universal. :) There are ways to make clicks worth more. Be from a US IP address. Stuff your browser with retargeting cookies by visiting high-value brand sites (e.g. car manufacturers, insurance websites, loan products, ecommerce stores). I've worked on the network side of ad ops and seen fraud. Amateur, easily detected and squelched fraud. It amounted to several thousand dollars a day. If you were the right combination of talented and not-overly-greedy, you could make a comfortable living by doing this fraudulently. > The primary beneficiary of the fraudulent clicks that are good enough to evade Google's detection is....Google. The primary beneficiary is the person getting the lion's share of the ad dollar, which often isn't Google. Don't get me wrong, Google has some perverse incentives here, too, but I suspect they'd be way more happy with a 0% fraud world than with the status quo.

Nitramp 11y ago
If you don't provide value to your customers (Advertisers) due to fraudulent clicks, ultimately your product is less valuable, and you make less money. I think Google's incentives are alright here.

asdf99 11y ago

see the big picture. every ad networks have fraud. fraud causes ctr to not equal advertiser profit. advertiser pays less and less for ads that do not create profit. you get less and less for your site. fraudsters get more bots and keep their earning stable while prices goes down. back to step one