Amidst a sizable number of online advertisers complaining that Facebook is billing for clicks that never happened, the inevitable class-action lawsuit has made its way to California court. Sports site RootZoo has accused Facebook of putting a heavy finger on the scale of its pay-per-click (PPC) advertiser program. Facebook's …

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Tuesday 14th July 2009 20:42 GMT Christopher Martin

An idea

Seems like with any click-based ad model, cases of abuse are inevitable. And on the scale of Facebook and Google, they will be frequent. Instead of taking every instance to court, it seems like when advertisers sign up they should agree to let some arbiter make decisions regarding accusations of fraud.

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Tuesday 14th July 2009 21:16 GMT Robert E A Harvey

Or

>Instead of taking every instance to court, it seems like when advertisers sign up they

>should agree to let some arbiter make decisions regarding accusations of fraud.

Or bugger off and find someone they trust to place their adverts.

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Wednesday 15th July 2009 09:03 GMT Steve Roper

RootZoo?

I don't know how that comes across to you Poms and Yanks, but here in Australia that name has some, er, rather unsavoury connotations... To me it sounds like something to do with bestiality!

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Wednesday 15th July 2009 09:03 GMT The Original Ash

@Robert E A Harvey

Sure, if you want adverts on www.thissiteisempty.com or www.nobodygoeshere.com

The most popular websites use Google for advertising. I've no impirical data on it, I just have a very strong suspicion that it's true. They put Google code into their website and Google serves advertisments.

That's like saying that if an engineer isn't getting money from big business in the city to try and get work in hamlets.

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Wednesday 15th July 2009 09:03 GMT lukewarmdog

Advertise elsewhere?

If I thought someone was defrauding me and didn't care, I'd take my business somewhere else. It's the only way to hurt this type of business model and I question whether Facebook is really the demographic that a sports site really wants.

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Wednesday 15th July 2009 09:59 GMT Aristotles slow and dimwitted horse

stv000@ntlworld.com

I'm sure that in the web based business model for smaller businesses there has to be some modicum of correlation between the name of a company, and it being successful in its chosen field of enterprise.

Perhaps if RootZoo changed its name to something that actually reflected the content that its site carries or provides then it wouldn't have to rely on such desperate advertising strategies such as Facebook.

To me, Root Zoo suggests trees and animals. Not crappy "American Football" stuff (read : a sport for men who are too scared to play rugby).

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Wednesday 15th July 2009 10:55 GMT AC 4

heh

How many visitors a day does stalkerbook get? And these chumps get an entire 300 - 800 clicks a day. Wow that is impressively crap, I'd have expected the proportion of retards clicking on adverts to be higher at stalkerbook.

Thank god advertising appears to be dying, it's fucking annoying and I know I've never clicked on one in my entire t'interweb career.

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Wednesday 15th July 2009 11:40 GMT Anonymous Coward

all click through advertisers are scams

... well in my experience at least.

In at least half of my web site projects i have been tasked with making a click tracking system as stats don't tally up with the charges being claimed.

.. seems to be there needs to be a way to prove the click throughs... in Broadcast (like TV) the broadcaster has to show logs to the advertiser to prove an advert was shown at a given time.

The problem with the web is that the people who rely on click throughs, small sites cannot afford to push google and facebook too far, otherwise they will go broke.

p.s. @AC4 :10.42 - thats fine, but the web will cease to be paid for without advertising so expect a lot less content, bandwidth etc.

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