Microsoft sues family over alleged click fraud

Tough shit.

Counting clickthroughs is, at best, a weak heuristic for measuring ad impact. Its status as a de facto standard shouldn't imply that anyone in the industry has a god-given right to utilize it successfully.

You have no idea why any click happened. The clicking user is probably not even aware of the financial transaction that occurs as a result. If the clicker did not agree to any conditions of clicking, I don't see how he can be found guilty of fraud for "misusing" a hyperlink.

If your business model is based on selling something using such terribly inaccurate and easily-manipulated metrics, sorry, but I'll not be quickly convinced that there's criminal activity afoot just because your numbers turned out shit-backwards wrong.

RE: Ummmm

CLick fraud is having a some sort of automation set up where a machine will click on the link several hundered times more than what is normal for wetware-based systems will do. The point of online advertising is to get real people to see the ads and influence their buying habits. This is how capitalism works.

@Christopher Ahrens

"The point of online advertising is to get real people to see the ads and influence their buying habits."

That may be the point, but conventional Marketing clearly doesn't "get" the Internet. My box, my rules. What ads?

Don't get me wrong, I can easily filter what I see online with my own wetware (close to thirty years of Usenet will do that for a guy) ... but having software filter all that crap, thus saving bandwidth, is a no-brainer. I don't pay attention to the ads out of reflex, so why bother displaying them on my computer? There is a reason that killfiles were invented.

Even my 70+ year old technophobe mother found & installed AdBlockPlus without any prompting from me ... and then installed it on my 94 year old great-aunt's computer. Online advertising as a profit center is doomed.

@jake - Online advertising doomed?

"Online advertising as a profit center is doomed."

I think not - that would make Google worthless. Advertising is like Spam. Spam still gets created because someone somewhere is still reading it and clicking on the viagra links.

Likewise people will always be clicking on ads. In truth, they can be quite helpful if you are looking for a service. It's the old saying: "I know that half of my advertising dollars are wasted ... I just don't know which half.".

Wooly, very wooly

Rememeber the old saying "Sheep were meant to be shorn". IMHO anyone in this day and age who spends good money on "pay per click" makes a Merino look like an Einstein! Baaah!

Exactly how many clicks are legal?

If someone wants to click on something for any reason, I feel they should have the right to do so. If you can only click a certain number of times, perhaps that should be in TOS. I would like to know what kind of contract Microsoft has with the the clickers.

Still don't see the fraud

If you're paying for the click, it was clicked, so you paid. Just because it's not someone interested in the ad doesn't make any difference. You should set up your metrics better to reflect real customers.

If you setup a freephone number, where you pay for your customers to call you, is it fraud if i sit on the line 24/7 causing you to pay for it? No, it would be fraud if i found some way of making you pay without me calling!

I wonder what is the legal basis for the fraud ...

...the defendents didn't convert any of the plaintiff's property to their own use.

If it's fraud to click on a PPC ad without any intention of buying the goods or services the ad represents then that's a very big legal net.

A question for Player_16

I've never really looked into Click Fraud before, so much like Benny I was kinda confused by how this can be deemed as it. In your response, you said...

"If someone clicks on an ad, Google pays the publisher of the add and collects a fee from the advertiser."

...this may well be a stupid question but I don't get who Google (or Microsoft or Yahoo) pays. I thought they were the publisher, as they are the ones publishing the advert. From your post, it sounds as though this isn't the case.

I understand how this threesome could be making money, as described in the article...

"Redmond suspects that Lam was hitting competitors with fake clicks so they would quickly exhaust their daily ad budgets. That way, his ads would pop to the top of Microsoft's listings. Microsoft's complaint says that when surfers clicked through to Lam's sites, he would collect their info and sell it on to auto insurance companies."

...So, as I understand it, they weren't actually getting any money from Microsoft..? Rather, they caused their competitors' adverts to get removed so that their own adverts would appear instead. Then they harvested the data of the users who clicked their ads and sold that data to those companies whose adverts they had caused to get removed.

So the genuine insurance companies got stung twice... once because they had paid Microsoft to publish adverts which weren't really being seen by their intended audience, and then again because they were buying data from Messieurs Lam and Madame Suen (although this was presumably their own choice).

I've gotta admit that I'm still not sure why Microsoft are suing these people. They clicked the links repeatedly (or arranged for others to click them).... what's to stop me from unintentionally doing the same. Am I breaking the law if I click a link, which is only there to be clicked, more than once?

Sheesh, this is all kinda confusing. I'm off to read up on encryption algorithms... at least that makes sense!

@AC - Still don't see the fraud

It's simple. It's not the clicks themselves that are fraudulent it's the way they got their ads to the top of the list so that people would click on them. "Click Fraud" is probably a misnomer in cases like this. "Search Fraud" would be a better term, but Click Fraud seems to be the generic term now.

The advertisers generate their own automated searches to force their own ads to the top of the list. Whether or not this is criminal or indeed moral is a moot point, it's certainly in breach of the terms of their contract with MS.

My question would be: Why, as usual, are a US company going after foreigners in a US court? Surely even if the court finds in favour of MS all the defendants have to do is steer clear of the US (not hard to do) and they are in the clear. Surely if they went through the Canadian courts and won then the defendants would have nowhere to hide.

The Model is wrong

in fact Google are pretty bad at this as well. You should be able to block IPs at least from registering, but beyond that it is just not a viable business model.

The irony is the problem of determining human or automation was fully understood at the start of the web, and what these companies are doing is trying to make what is a legitimate action illegal.

Here is a clue don't run offers like this, or base business models on it, it is too open to abuse and because of semi acceptance it has hampered the evolution of correct solutions.

It is like opening a shop, and just getting people to pop the cash in a tin for what they take, now you can bleat on about if people steal it is just wrong, but it is done so they don't have to pay staff, which effects the economy as a whole.

@AC 17-06-09 09:49

In this context, the "publisher" is the website displaying the ad. It's the income that keeps the website free. The advertiser is the company that paid the search company to place the ad.

It's a type of fraud because the links are intended to be clicked on by wetware, not software. There's no way three people repeatedly clicking on the same advertising links would drain the pot of advertising money for an ad. It had to be automated, and it has to be intentional.

And yes, you can be charged with fraud for repeatedly calling a toll-free number with the intent of causing the provider of the number to lose money. Although I will admit I've thought about doing that a couple of times.

@Robin 2; @Martin 19

""Online advertising as a profit center is doomed."

"I think not - that would make Google worthless"

Correct. The paper value of google is highly overrated. Don't believe me? Watch what happens the first time a major share holder sells out. It'll be Holland & tulips & 1637 all over again.

"So when are you going to start paying for sites like The Register then"

As soon as I start paying for Usenet and other similar forms of text entertainment.

"or are all the people and companies involved going to continue to provide their services for free, just to please you?"

Nope. They are going to have to find a new business model, or go under. Simple economics.

"Or would you prefer that the advertising merged with the content, so you could never trust an article or review again?"

Here's a hint, buddy: This is ENTERTAINMENT, not education. Learn the difference.

@Maty

Maty, you do realize that your ad hominem filled diatribe has nothing to do with what I wrote, right?