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John Chow’s TTZ Media And Click Fraud

Posted by Paul B | November 28, 2007 .

It only seems like yesterday that I was writing about Click Fraud and how the new breed of CPC advertising networks were going to need to up their game when it comes to preventing it. It’s one of Google’s biggest issues with Adsense and if they can’t eliminate it completely then who can? I wasn’t surprised to see then that John Chow’s TTZ Media affiliate network is already starting to experience some problems.

“One of the things that came up as we started accepting more affiliates who are not friends with John Chow was this : CLICK FRAUD.
So many affiliates are starting to take advantage of it, logging more clicks than they should, that are not deserved.”

Apparently thousands of clicks have already been removed from the system due to some simple IP checks. From my own experience this is not good enough, for example I can think of at least 2 employers I know where more than 9,000 employees share a single external IP address. Even several hundred clicks from that same IP over the space of a month or 2 may not be fraud, it can easily happen once those spammy work e-mails start getting circulated about a page that perhaps has TTZ ads on it. Not only that but large scale fraudsters will of course be cloning and hijacking thousands of IP’s which simple database queries are not going to easily detect. There is nothing easy about stopping click fraud (Just ask Google) but in order to make life fair for both the advertiser and the publishers you’ve got to invest in it, as far as TTZ Media are concerned it looks like they are prepared to put that investment in and it will be interesting to see how they get on.

Just to make things clear I would never recommend anybody try and con an advertising network. It is this sort of thing that will eventually see the end of CPC advertising that so many of us rely on for large parts of our income. Think about it, when the advertisers don’t see a good enough ROI then they either lower prices or pull the plug. Making money online takes work and time, click fraud is for fools.

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4 Comments so far
  1. Jeff Kee CANADA Mac OS X Safari 523.10  November 28, 2007 11:23 am

    I absolutely agree with your final statement - it hurts everybody, and diminishes the quality of advertisements as a whole. Better that we all keep it clean to keep a healthy marketplace!

    As we speak I’m writing more algorithms to prevent click fraud ;) There’s more to it than IPs, and there’s also many other legal aspects to be considered as well… it’s not just all about code.

  2. Paul B UNITED KINGDOM Windows XP Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.10  November 28, 2007 4:00 pm

    Good luck Jeff, the less fraud there is the more money advertisers will have to spend on us genuine publishers! :)

  3. gale UNITED STATES Windows XP Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.9  November 28, 2007 11:41 pm

    click fraud does hurt everybody, but i also appreciate your email example, where tons of employees may be sharing one ip address in a company. this is an issue that, when resolved, will make CPC far more valuable and safer. i was thinking about a dangerous situation: if someone REALLY wanted to kill another’s ad revenue, then couldn’t he/she simply click relentlessly on the ads to “create” ad fraud for the web owner? scary. again, thanks for the post and keep up the great blogging

  4. PHP eBook UNITED STATES Mac OS X Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.9  December 2, 2007 7:51 am

    People are always going to try to get a free lunch, but is it really worth it to try and scam your business partners out of money? CPC might be on the way out, but the people who are pulling shady deals now will get blacklisted at least by the big names (er… Google) and then they’ll be left to fend for themselves.

    It’s better to take your bumps and learn your lessons, to eventually make some good money the right way, rather than try and scam them by clicking your ads a few extra times.