by Raven Lebeau

Created on: November 11, 2008

The term "click fraud" refers to the act of artificially inflating hits to a website. The reasons for click fraud are simple; most companies pay advertising fees based on the number of hits accumulated by their ads. Hence, the more clicks to an ad, the more money that ad generates. The goal of online advertising is to attract genuinely interested visitors to a company's website, so click fraud, in essence, is a way of forcing companies to pay advertising money and get nothing in return.

When hit counters were less sophisticated, click fraud could be committed by one individual, or a small group of people, clicking on an ad multiple times. However, because hit counting software now tracks IP addresses, more sophisticated measures are required. Websites that force a user to click on an ad in order to view a video or other content are bordering on click fraud, as the users who click on the ads are probably not interested in the product or service advertised.

True click fraud is generally committed by programmers able to write "bots," scripts that generate clicks from randomized false IP addresses. The widespread use of bots is the reason that many sites use a simple Turing test before allowing users to register. A Turing test is a means of differentiating between a human and a program. The most common type of Turing test is one in which the user is asked to enter a string of symbols, which are displayed in a distorted fashion.

By verifying that site users are indeed real human beings, websites can be sure that clicks from their users are genuine. This gives advertisers some measure of confidence when advertising at those sites. A hit on their ad from a logged-in user probably does indicate that a potential customer did come to their site out of honest interest in their ad.

Click fraud undermines the foundation of ad-based online businesses such as MySpace, Helium, FanFiction and other social networking/ugc sites. If advertisers are unable to trust the data from a site, they are likely to reallocate their advertising dollars to more traditional venues such as TV or radio. This hurts all of us who earn a share of ad revenue, and all of us who enjoy posting content or viewing content on ad-supported sites. If the ad-supported content business model is to be successful, the Internet community will need to find a solid technological solution to the click fraud problem.

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