Is it Time for a New Search Advertising Model?
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The pay-per-click advertising model has been around since 1998. In those nine years a number of unsavory characters have attempted – some very successfully – to make money from the model while hurting innocent people. This article looks at some of the harmful effects of PPC, and wonders if there is something better on the horizon.
The most obvious evil to come out of pay-per-click advertising is click fraud. For those of you just coming to the table, click fraud happens when an advertiser’s ad is clicked by someone with no intention of following through with a purchase or other action, often repeatedly. Since the advertisers are paying by the click, click fraud can quickly cost an advertiser a ton of money with nothing to show for it.
We’ve covered click fraud in a number of articles here on SEO Chat; most recently, we looked at botnets getting into the game. While some estimate that one in every five clicks on ads can be attributed to click fraud, Google has said that it makes up less than ten percent of clicks on pay-per-click advertising. Unfortunately, it’s hard to know who to believe, since the search engines and the industry in general disagree on what kind of clicks can be considered click fraud. After all, users can click on an ad legitimately and then choose not to do anything when they see the landing page.
The problem is that pay-per-click advertising almost invites click fraud. Everyone knows that advertisers are paying by the click. So if Company A, a rival to Company B, wants to cost Company B a lot of money, then Company A can just click repeatedly on Company B’s ads. Company A thus forces Company B to use up its resources a lot more quickly – and all it needs to spend is a little time and effort. Competition is supposed to be a lot cleaner than that; whatever happened to making the better product or having better relations with your customers?
That’s not the only version of click fraud by a long shot. You may have heard of “made for AdSense” sites. AdSense is the publisher’s side of Google’s search advertising machinery. The way it works is that owners of content-based web sites sign up for AdSense in order to allow Google to run text ads on their sites. They then get a cut of the money when visitors click on the ads. Well, a number of those content-based sites were specifically created to host those ads – and then the owners either click on the ads themselves to get a little extra income, or invite all their friends to do so. This is a direct violation of Google’s Terms of Service, but that doesn’t deter the fraudsters.
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