Monday, October 27, 2008

Click fraud still ticking off advertisers

A Click Forensics quarterly report estimates click fraud to be about 16 percent of all clicks, industry-wide. Though this represents a drop from 16.2 percent in the second quarter, it remains a problem for online advertisers and search engines, according to

Click Forensics, a click-service-detection service, found that the use of botnets to spread click fraud continues to gain speed, as it accounts for almost 28 percent of cases of click fraud, as compared to 25.2 percent in the second quarter.

A botnet is a network of computers that hackers use to send spam and commit click fraud. According to Tom Cuthbert, president of Click Forensics, botnets pose a serious problem because they create click fraud traffic that is "very difficult to catch and identify because it's coming from individual machines."

Compared to the overall click fraud rate of 16 percent, the average rate on networks that advertise on search engines like Google, Yahoo and others, was higher at 27.1 percent

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