Yahoo! Click Fraud Lawsuit

by Sapphire (August 26, 2006)

Yes, there’s a class action suit against Yahoo! for click fraud allegations. I’ve received a letter stating that I’m included in the suit, even though I don’t remember ever buying any PPC advertising through Yahoo’s search marketing system. Ever. Still, I don’t know how many class action suits I’ve been included in and not bothered opting out of - I’ve never gotten a cent, a thank you note, or anything else out of them. Pardon my French, but it’s an entirely masturbatory act among lawyers. No response I give would make any difference.

Which is unfortunate, because click fraud is a problem. I’ve posted on it before. The fact is, click fraud is undetectable to anyone but the search engines, who have nothing to lose by allowing it to go on. They can’t be unaware of the PTR fraudulent clicking rings all over the net. These sites are indexed in Google and Yahoo, and you know if it was in their best interest to boot them, they’d do it. There have been reports of organized click rings in India, and various other forms of click fraud for several years now. And yet the search engines kept telling us there was no problem.

I’m going to think again about removing PPC ads from my sites entirely. I don’t mind PPC in the form of AdBrite and other non-SE-related companies that sell adspace for you and only populate empty slots with PPC. I doubt those are targeted by click fraud folks. But AdSense and Yahoo’s PPC system… you bet they are. If advertisers are unaware of how their money may be wasted on PPC, maybe the least I can do is remove the ads most likely to allow it to be wasted.

Besides, it’s not like AdSense and Yahoo are performing at all for me lately. Like I said recently, they seem to record only a fraction of the impressions my pages receive every day. How much of this is due to fraud and how much is due to other factors, I can’t say. Nor can I say exactly who’s to blame. But do I want to be a part of something that sounds like a reasonable straightforward business system, yet allows businesses to lose enormous funds through fraud?

Posted in PPC
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