by April J.

Created on: November 19, 2008   Last Updated: March 10, 2011

Advertising revenue has become one of the driving forces of business on the Internet, with many owners of websites accepting payment from advertisers in return for displaying their ads on their sites. Of course, the question then arises of "how do they determine how much the website owner (or "publisher") gets paid?" Well, because the goal of every advertiser is to have their ad viewed by as many human eyes as possible, a seemingly logical answer to this question is "the website owner gets paid more, based on how many people view the ad". Seems to make sense, right?

Because of the nature of the Internet, this quickly becomes problematic. First of all, a simple method is needed to measure the number of unique visits to a website and often, in computer security, the more simple a system is the more vulnerable it is to manipulation. In this case, it is possible to measure clicks on a webpage, but how much does this really reflect what the advertiser really wants to measure - which is the number of unique, human, potentially interested visitors viewing their ad?

One problem is that measuring "intent" is virtually impossible when just measuring clicks, so while they may know that a person clicked a link to the website, there is no way to tell whether this was done out of interest, or for more nefarious purposes (such as driving up ad revenue for the site). Another interesting problem is that is difficult to tell whether it is even a human viewing the site, or whether it is just some program mimicking the clicking behavior. Another problem is (at the risk of sounding cynical) that online, you can guarantee that any time there is money involved, there is the incentive for people to manipulate the system to manipulate the flow of that money. It is this problem that is behind the relatively new online phenomenon of "click fraud".

CLICK FRAUD - WHAT IS IT?

"Click fraud" is the act of clicking on links online or visiting websites with the specific goal of manipulating ad revenue connected to that site, typically in cases where the site makes use of "pay-per-click" advertising, where advertisers pay the owner of the website a cut based on the level of traffic to that site, ideally with the idea that the more traffic, the more viewers of the ad. If a website receives more "clicks", the advertiser has to pay more to the publisher, and click fraud can potentially interfere with this setup to manipulate that amount.

HOW?

Click fraud can be performed in a variety of ways, ranging

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