Playing The Game Or Fraud?

Posted by Paul B | October 16, 2007 .

Pay-Per-Click in whatever guise you take it has to be the easiest way of making money online. For most people it may not be the best way of making lots of money but when it comes to giving you a morale boost there is no easier way of earning a few dollars. It’s no surprise then that as Google sloooowly leans more towards an action based model for Adsense there is no shortage of new PPC brokers trying to get you to show ads for them. I only hope they’re properly prepared.

Back in the day when hosting and bandwidth cost several hundred dollars a month I was out there giving software away for free. At 4 meg a download my costs were pretty high, that is why I turned to advertising. I tried several CPA schemes that although well targeted they didn’t convert well at all. Banner advertising just didn’t seem to work on my website. It was then that I found a company also offering PPC ads so installed them. In the first month I made a couple of pound, nothing like enough to cover my costs. In order to try and get more clicks I decided to embed some simple ads into the software I was giving away, it did work a little bit but click through rates will still way below 0.05%! That’s when I hit on the idea of instead of just showing the ad link, why not open it for them? (I’ve got to point out that the company in question had nothing in their TOS about software clicks) So that’s what I did and was it an eye opener! In the first week of putting the new ad enabled software out my account was showing a balance of more than £2000, what’s more because of the randomness of the adverts being shown and the random factor of whether to open them or not and the fact that only 1 add would be shown per user per 2 weeks everything looked normal in the stats. This carried on for several more weeks until I was due to get paid, I bottled it. You see I’d only planned to cover hosting, not turn a profit so when I saw the figures involved I closed my account without payment. I put my hands up, stopped that version of the software in it’s tracks and told the advertising company that all my “clicks” should be refunded to the advertisers. What happened next surprised me, they admitted that they had no idea that many of my clicks were not valid, not only that but they invited me back to create a new account and use it properly. I declined because by then I’d discovered Adsense and was earning very good totally legitimate money with them.

So the question is fair game or fraud? Google have made a huge investment in removing click fraud from Adsense, with all these new PPC providers popping up I only hope that they are putting the investment in to run a fair network for their advertisers and publishers alike. If not then it’s going to be here today and gone tomorrow which nobody wants to see.

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3 Comments so far

jackbravo October 21, 2007 12:14 am

Man, you made over like 7000 pounds, and returned it? Wow….now that’s integrity.
Paul B October 24, 2007 9:08 am

Closer to 10000, but what’s a few grand between friends? To be honest I sh!t myself when I saw how much I was earning. It was quite a few years ago, being somebody who now spends money on advertising I hope all these new PPC companies have got their anti-fraud sorted!
John Chow's TTZ Media And Click Fraud November 28, 2007 11:13 am

[...] 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 [...]

Playing The Game Or Fraud?

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