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India's Secret Army of Clickers

by Marc Lefton
Sunday, February 27, 2005. 09:06PM
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This India Times article uncovers the seedy underbelly of the search engine world. An army of clickers, mostly in India, are paid to click ads without looking at them in order to pad ad revenues. Knowing this, wouldn't you be a bit wary about services like Google's Adwords?

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Monday, February 28, 2005. 12:22PM by Marc Lefton
Kaza--I think the article pointed out that the targets of these campaigns were companies that did not devote much resources to click tracking. If you track clicks you can certainly see this. I'm one who would be victim to this because I never set it up for Adholes or our other punk site.
Monday, February 28, 2005. 11:46AM by Darren Herman
Kaza, you raise a good point, but the issue is 'ip-spoofing' and getting around IP addresses/country-codes. There are lots of people out there that can mask or switch their IP dynamically and I'm sure these Indian companies are doing so. Wow, makes me think how much I've spent on click-fraud!
Monday, February 28, 2005. 11:32AM by Kaza Razat
I'm partially skeptical of this Marc. Those clicks from India would be easily tracked by any decent IT person. It's possible that they could spoof the IPs but it's really unlikely. Anytime you click anything on the internet your unique address is tracked and if that was the case it would take no time at all for pay-per click clients to discover the crime.
Monday, February 28, 2005. 10:40AM by Noelle Weaver
Wow! Good find Marc. I hate hearing about stuff like this... what's real anymore?
Monday, February 28, 2005. 09:33AM by Alexis Adauto Ferguson
Yeah - I guess perception is reality.
Monday, February 28, 2005. 08:27AM by Kim S
I remember when we started our website years and years ago, we used to go around telling fellow employees to log onto our website on a daily basis. With tens of thousands of hits a day, we don't have to do that anymore...
Monday, February 28, 2005. 07:56AM by Alexis Adauto Ferguson
That sucks. It totally undermines the "advertising works" philosophy I preach. It justs takes one bad thing to taint the industry as a whole. I know I'm being a little dramatic... but can you imagine trying to convince a client to use that medium now? Shanky is right - it will get corrected. I just hate hearing about stuff like this.
Monday, February 28, 2005. 06:55AM by Shanky Das
holy cow (no, i'm serious), the plot thickens. i have a few friends back home who are into software and such, but i had no idea that there actualy 'clickers.' have to admit though, that it's not the kind of thing that can stay hidden for too long - i do get the feeling that advertisers and the like will ctach on soon enough and a buffer (+/- error margin) will have to be built into any estimates.

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