The Hidden World of Click Fraud
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You've heard plenty of reports about click fraud. But who is doing it? And what are the pressures motivating them? This author interviews several anonymous webmasters engaging in click fraud in Lagos, and discovers a small piece of a much bigger problem.
After six months away from Lagos, working in sun-drenched Eket, I returned to Lagos intent on getting up to speed on what my companions in the tech center of West Africa were up to. Three days into my return, I was at a meeting for a non-governmental organization for which I do pro bono work. After the meeting I was talking to another web master who was offering me web space. As our conversation progressed he began griping about how much competition there was in web design.
I asked him what other things he was doing apart from web design and hosting, and with a sly look on his face he shared his practices with me. Ten minutes later, stupefied, I was interviewing another colleague, a graphics designer who wanted to work with me on several projects. The result of these interviews and three others led me to write this report on click fraud on the streets of Lagos.
The Foundation
If you have ever studied ways of making money off the Internet, you will definitely have come across the literally thousands of get rich quick scams that run on Adsense. Self-styled gurus offer to sell you secrets on how you can "instantly" increase traffic and get people to click on your Adsense accounts, thereby making millions for yourself (and Google). Thousands of legitimate sites and blogs have Adsense accounts which provide them with some amount of money every month; for example, www.soulcast.com's entire remunerations package is based on paying the bloggers a percentage of the revenue generated by Adsense placed on the site. The site http://www.plentyoffish.com/ averages ten thousand dollars a day on Adsense revenue.
Compare this number to the average amount (sometimes meager) a small personal or business site will make and you have a situation in which website owners will be tempted to click on their own ads. Even worse are the "made for Adsense" sites, which are only online so that they can generate revenue off Adsense, having no real concern for content or user experience. They build hundreds of sites with content replicating software and CMS, monetize all their links and place Adsense on all their sites. They hail themselves as heroes and are eulogized on blogs while making six figures yearly off Adsense revenue.
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