Is Adsense and Adwords as good as dead? Even Yahoo! Beta is in jeporady.

Click Fraud: Click fraud is when an individual, automated� script, or computer program is used� to click on ads to help a friend generate revenue. That same individual might uses the computer program (called a robot) to click on competitors ads so that competitors charges from Google are quite high.

After all the lawsuits and click fraud prosecutions, Google is finally beginning to release information about click fraud to its Adwords / Adsense program this Tuesday. This was finally done after months or accusations that Google was not making a great enough effort to prevent the estimated 20% click fraud rate.

According to MercuryNews, “Shuman Ghosemajumder, business product manager for trust and safety, said the Mountain View company will tell advertisers how many clicks have been deemed invalid each day for advertising campaigns they run on Google. “This gives them the data that shows that Google is doing what we say we have been doing,” Ghosemajumder said in an interview.

Google claims to use sophisticated technology such as tracking someone’s IP address to prevent click fraud and protect both itself and advertisers who used Google Adwords to promote their online business.

Why Could It Be Over For Google and Yahoo?

According to a source, a judge in Arkansas is expected to rule tomorrow (Friday July 28, 2006) on a proposed $90 million dollar lawsuit between Google and it’s largest Adwords Publishers. This lawsuit comes after time and time again advertisers are claiming that Google is not making a real attempt at stopping click fraud.Â� I don’t believe this will not cripple Google entirely if the advertisers win I believe. This could be an end to text based advertising with Adsense and Adwords though. Yahoo! is also waiting on a separate lawsuit for supposed click fraud.

Why Are There So Many Fraudulent Clicks?

A bad click, or click fraud, is generated from one of the following:

- A person who is attempting to hurt a competitor by running up their charges that Google charges the advertiser.
- A publisher who uses Adsense to increase his or her web site revenue.

In the end, the most important thing that advertisers were looking to do with Google Adwords is deliver the promised “hot leads.” Instead, they were finding time and time again that visitors were coming from other web sites that had nothing in relation to their ad. For example, someone would click an ad for “Market Finance”� from a web site about “Kids Toys.” These odd click through sources helped generate the idea that many click throughs were fraudulent.

I’ll try to keep everyone updated on this story as it develops in the courts.

Matthew Peschong
Minnesota Website Design