Third-Party Companies Attack the Click Fraud Problem

From E-Commerce Times:

Some analysts believe click fraud is overhyped, while others say the problem is serious enough that it threatens the growth prospects for an industry that played a huge role in reviving the Internet.

While Google, Yahoo and others will refund advertisers who can prove fraud, they have been criticized for being less than forthcoming about the scope of the problem. Their silence has created an opening for a growing number of smaller, third-party firms -- Click Detective, Click Authority and Authenticlick to name a few -- that seek to sell services and software to advertisers for combating the scourge.

Naturally when a problem is identified, the marketplace generates a solution and offers it for sale. That solution may be more effective and efficient than solutions developed by the search engines (which benefit financially from click fraud) or the government (which, for a number of reasons, cannot regulate the issue).

Hopefully, third-party service providers can assist pay-per-click (PPC) advertisers to quantify the problem and reduce its effect. As previously posted on E-Commerce Law, it may be impossible to completely eliminate the effect of click fraud on PPC advertisers. However, to maintain the confidence of those advertisers as consumers, the problem must be accurately quantified and the search engines who offer PPC advertising programs must continue to improve their methods of reducing its effect.

For more on the efforts of third-party companies to address the click fraud problem, see the full E-Commerce Times article: Cybersleuths Seek to Uncover Click Fraud Artists.

For Mark Cuban’s thoughts on click fraud, see What is click fraud? on blog maverick.

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