Thursday, May 11, 2006
Let's Drop PPC in Favor of Flat Rate
From what I've been seeing, I think it's only a matter of time before contextual network advertising is largely replaced by flat-rate advertising. Why? Click Fraud!
Click fraud is out of control and the providers either can't or in some cases I feel, won't seriously address the problem. The losers are the advertisers. If they are lucky they will not be in an industry that's on the radar of those doing most of the fraud, but if they aren't they have to be making quite a bit from sales to justify what they are spending.
A Flat-Rate Ad system something like what AdBrite.com offers is the only way I can see to combat the problem. What it would do is remove the incentive for fraud completely. The other option would be for the advertising networks to gain access to the advertisers traffic information, but most advertisers will not want to give up that information, and frankly I think the effort involved to process the data is more than search engines want to take on, especially when you consider they will be reducing their income when they really see how bad the fraud problem is...!
I have to believe that the fraudsters have evolved to the point that they can commit the fraud in a slow controlled way so as to not attract attention to what they are doing. A large-scale operation could easily assemble thousands of clickers, using hijacked proxy servers, or just those free AOL accounts to cover up the abuse.
(hris
