AdSense Click Fraud Highest in India -Labnol

A recent report on Click Fraud suggests that the maximum number of invalid clicks on Pay Per Click ads originate from India. And this is not the first time - its widely believed there there exists a large “work from home” crowd in India who want to generate “quick cash” by clicking Google AdSense ads.

Pick any issue of Deccan Chronicle newspaper (the English Daily of Hyderabad) and open the Classifieds section - you will see dozens of ads that promise you regular Google AdSense income while working from home.

You basically create a website and then write a few articles to get accepted into the official Google AdSense program. Once you become an AdSense publisher, you join any of these “bogus” AdSense network and are introduced to other members who are in the same boat as you. Now Google would quickly ban your AdSense account if you click Ads on your own website so what these networks do is ask members to click on Ads appearing on websites of other members. So it like a reciprocal behavior - you click my ads and I will click yours.

You’re Better Off Working at Starbucks Than Running a Social Network -Om Malik

Peanut Labs, a company that couldn’t find a business as an also-ran social network, says "The CPMs (cost per thousand advertisements) are so low it’s really hard to build a real business unless you have several billion page views and your own sales team. Social networks get 5 to 10 cent CPMs, and less outside the U.S. At one point we were averaging 3 cent CPMs. We figured out if we all got up and worked at Starbucks instead we would make more money as a company than selling 300 million impressions a month of ad space"

Cartoon -Hindu

“Could you call up later when none of us is at home? We have just bought an answering machine!”

6% of People Online Contribute 50% of Display Ad Clicks -Read Write Web

Only 6% of people online are contributing 50% of the clicks to display advertisements- Those people who click heavily have a number of other characteristics of note. Heavy clickers skew towards Internet users between the ages of 25-44 and households with an income under $40,000 and they are also relatively more likely to visit auctions, gambling, and career services sites – a markedly different surfing pattern than non-clickers.

The authors conclude that the heavy clickers do shop more online than the population at large, but not at a rate proportional to their click rate influence. In other words, if your ads are getting a lot of click-throughs and you are holding your breath that they will monetize better any day now - you're not likely to find relief any time soon. The study also found that there was not a high correlation between heavy clickers and increased brand loyalty.

Who Owns What ? -Labnol

Amy Webb is tracking all the acquisitions made by Internet giants like Yahoo!, Google, Microsoft and AOL. No wonder, the red block corresponding to Google occupies the maximum estate.