Click fraud is an unfortunate byproduct of the pay per clickadvertising business. Many people with an online business spendlarge amounts of funds
on pay per click advertising only todiscover that many of the many people
clicking on their ads werent really interested in their products or services.
Bogus "visitors" to a pay per click advertisement
represent click fraud. This is a serious scam that threatens the viability of the payper click selling
business which has become enormouslyprofitable for all of the major search engine operators, namelyGoogle, Yahoo/Overture, and MSN.
Click fraud has different forms, but the finish
result is generallythe same. Advertisers are billed for fruitless visitors
generated by someone who repeatedly clicks on an advertisers advertisement
without any intention of ever buying anything.
The search engine advertising market 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
