Click Fraud Makes the Cover of BusinessWeek
Thousands of articles from the mainstream press and business press have been published about click fraud. This week, BusinessWeek makes the topic a subject of BW investigation and a cover story by Brian Grow and Ben Elgin. Along with the article you'll find numerous sidebars, graphics (the differences between click fraud 1.0 and 2.0), and slide shows.
Title:
Click Fraud: The dark side of online advertising
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/06_40/b4003001.htm
+ Opens with the story of Mark Fleischmann, an Atlanta businessman (owns a company called MostChoice.com) who says click fraud, "cost his business more than $100,000 since 2003."
From the article:
+ "A BusinessWeek investigation has revealed a thriving click-fraud underground populated by swarms of small-time players, making detection difficult. "Paid to read" rings with hundreds or thousands of members each, all of them pressing PC mice over and over in living rooms and dens around the world. In some cases, "clickbot" software generates page hits automatically and anonymously."
From the article:
+ "BusinessWeek's independent analysis of the MostChoice records turned up additional indications of click fraud. Over the past six months, the company received 139 visitors through an advertisement on the parked site health*i*nsurancebids.com, which offers only ads supplied by Yahoo. Most of these visitors were located in Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Egypt, and Ukraine. Their average stay on MostChoice.com was only six seconds, and none of them became a customer."
The story includes several sidebars and a podcast.
+ Podcast
http://www.businessweek.com/mediacenter/podcasts/cover_stories/covercast_09_21_06.htm
+ Graphic: Evolution of a Scam
Versions 1.0 and 2.0
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/06_40/b4003008.htm
+ Rogues Glossary (terms liked Parked Web Site and Paid to Read)
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/06_40/b4003004.htm
+ Advertisers In China Are Getting Burned, Too
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/06_40/b4003011.htm
+ Click Fraud Slide Show: Follow the Money
http://images.businessweek.com/ss/06/09/clickfraud/slideshow.htm
+ Graphic: Other Media Scandals
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/06_40/b4003007.htm
+ Taking The Search Engines To Court
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/06_40/b4003008.htm
+ Doing Business With A Controversial Partner
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/06_40/b4003012.htm
Online Extras
+ Click Fraud's Next Frontier
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/06_40/b4003013.htm
From the article,
"Search engines, marketers, and law-enforcement agencies are increasingly worried about networks of automated miscreants called "botnets." These are groups of computers that have been infected by malicious software that allows the fraudsters to seize control."
+ Slide Show: The Botnet Threat
http://images.businessweek.com/ss/05/05/hacker_botnet/index_01.htm |
