Almost everyone is trying to make news out of something that isn’t at all newsworthy: paid advertising “click fraud” (CPC fraud).  From news and trade media to vendors, they’re ready to report on—or solve—a problem that does not exist. 

Click Fraud, Itself, Has Become a Fraud
The media and others are working overtime to convince us that advertisers actually *do* give a damn.  They don’t and Google’s valuation, growth and sources of revenue (99%, as reported by Wired, from click ads) serve to prove the point. 

Still, those around us beat a drum as if we should care, worry, freak out, spend, downgrade, speculate, invest, hold… whatever.  Today, Wired Magazine joins in the hype parade proclaiming in its headline that ”Click Fraud Could Swallow the Internet.” Never mind the fact that everything in the article itself, like the countless pieces written before it, points to the contrary:

Advertisers Embrace Click Fraud
Advertisers don’t mind click fraud and probably never will so long as:

A) Google et al give them no control over it

B) They can factor it in to the assumed operational cost of advertising on the Web

C) They remain completely mystified by search marketing

Still… Wired is absolutely breathless, screaming “It’s search giants against scam artists in an arms race that could crash the entire online economy.”

The entire online economy?  Is Wired seriously asking us to believe that click fraud is anything other than an accepted risk?  I ask author, Charles Mann, to consider one simple fact before he proudly hangs a framed version of the story on his office wall.  That is, every article ever written (to my knowledge) about click fraud “victims” share the following commonalities.  The “victim”:

* Has been systematically and repeatedly dismissed by their PPC search ad provider—even after offering their own damning evidence of fraud

* Has asked their PPC search ad provider for fraud detection assistance—only to be offered a trivial “credits” on their account

* Has continued to buy PPC ad traffic from their PPC search provider—thereby agreeing to pay for future fraudulent clicks

Advertisers: Click Junkies
“Search… search… search… must ‘do search’... can’t understand but must do search.” Marketing Sherpa’s Search Marketing Benchmark Guide affirms that advertisers are perplexed with search based on how “technical” it is.  Still, they must be there.  Wired tells us…

“Yahoo! gave Boris Elpiner (of RingCentral) full credit. But it did not, as far as he could tell, try to identify the perpetrators. Instead, Yahoo! and other PPC companies are responding to click fraud by deploying new anti-fraud technologies. For example, Yahoo! analysts have created click fraud filters - algorithmic screens that sift through the sea of incoming clicks to find patterns suggesting fraud and then discard phony clicks without regard to source or motive.”

What happens when a technology company enters into advertising (a services business)?  This does.  Yahoo! and Google aren’t going to staff up, they’re going to keep on taking advertiser’s money, apologize and scramble to fix it with, duh, technology.  The market has, however, told them “no need to hurry, guys” and they’re happy to oblige.

A member of Google’s anti-fraud team working from his home office.

Still, Yahoo!, Google and other click networks are obligated to bullshit us into thinking they care a little bit.  John Slade (seen at right working in Yahoo!’s Sunnyvale-based “office") leads Yahoo! Search’s click fraud task force and is quoted in Wired’s January 2006 issue as saying, “If you’d told me five years ago that I would be talking about ‘fake clicks,’ I would have told you that you were crazy.  Now it’s all I spend my time on.”

Well, that and discovering new ways to achieve inner peace.