While click fraud and identity theft are probably the most common forms of larceny on the Internet, I just heard of a company that sets a whole new standard of bad, lying to advertisers about, well, everything.
Click fraud is when a web site either clicks on its own ads to increase revenue, gets someone else to click on them with no intention of buying or works with botnets to generate millions of illegal clicks. I wrote a few months ago how longtime YouTubers were suffering income drops as Google algorithmically eliminated their botnet clicks. But click fraud requires a third party ad network to work. What I am writing about here is something […]
Whether at the casino or the race track, the house always wins. That’s the way it has always been, too, with Internet advertising. Nearly all Internet ad dollars are spent in two ways: 1) buying ads from advertising networks whether that network is Google or Yahoo or even IDGTechNet, which sells space on this rag, or; 2) buying search terms — the right to have your ad shown every time someone searches on the word hermaphrodite, for example. Network profit in those transactions comes from arbitrage — buying low and selling high. But what if there was a more efficient way to buy and sell Internet ads? As of this morning it looks like there […]