Anyone heard of click fraud?

I don't know about you people, but to me click fraud is a growing problem. Not only are big advertising like Google and Yahoo! affected, but the whole economy!

Some basic overview:
The PPC (pay-per-click) is an advertising system where advertisers pay middlemen to put ads up. Often, these middlemen pay others to put ads up. It's an interesting setup. Online advertising is expected to reach 18.9 Billion dollars by 2010 (jupitermedia.com)

So what's up?

Competitors, the "others", and people in it just for income do click fraud. What's that? It's when you click on an ad, maliciously, without intent of viewing the ad or buying the product/service. Companies do it to make their competitors lose a lot of money. Single people do it to get money from the middleman (and through the chain, the advertiser), or are paid to click on other people's ads through hourly wage.

Estimates put click fraud up to 20% of all clicks today (news.com). With a value of 3.2 Billion dollars, that's 640 million dollars this year. By 2010, it'll be 3.78 BILLION Dollars!!

I recently got on it when I heard that many of the major advertising middleman were sued by advertisers for the click fraud problem. Some of you may wonder why the middleman and not the actual fraud people, but it's the middleman's job to make sure that all the clicks charged are for legit hits.


Here's some articles for those interested:

Yahoo! Full Cash Refunds + at least 4.95 litigation

News.com Exposing Click Fraud

Google 90 Million dollar lawsuit