An unfortunate byproduct of the pay per click advertising doing business is
click fraud. Many many people
with an online business spend large amounts of money on pay per click selling
only todiscover that many of the all the people clicking on their ads werent really interested in their products or services.
Bogus "visitors" to a pay per click ad represent click fraud. This is a serious scam that threatens the viability of the payper click advertising business which has become enormouslyprofitable for all of the major search engine operators, namelyGoogle, Yahoo/Overture, and MSN.
Click fraud has different twists, but the finish
result is generallythe identical
. Advertisers are billed for fruitless visitors
generated by someone who repeatedly clicks on an advertisers ad without any intention of ever buying anything.
The search engine advertising sell
is currently about $3.8 billion per year and estimates vary widely on how much click fraud is actually going on. Clearly, the search engine operatorswould like to downplay the extent of this problem. Some industryexperts claim that a little click fraud exists but that it isoverblown by advertiser paranoia, while others estimate that tento twenty percent of all clicks are false (made by someone withno legitimate interest in the ad itself
