A seller of online marketing tools said on Wednesday it sued Google Inc., charging that the Web search giant has failed to protect users of its advertising program from "click fraud," costing them at least $5 million. Click Defense Inc. filed its lawsuit, which also seeks class action status, on June 24 in U.S. District Court in San Jose, California.

Click fraud is not "fraud" as defined under the law. Rather, it is an industry term used to describe the deliberate clicking on Web search ads by users with no plans to do business with the advertiser. Rival companies might employ people or machines to do this because the advertiser has to pay the Web search provider for each click.

News source: Reuters

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There are 24 additional comments
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Quote this comment Reply to this comment #1 Posted by mtdlabs on 30 Jun 2005 - 16:58
Everyone wants easy money these days
(4 replies) Quote this comment Reply to this comment #2 Posted by Blackima on 30 Jun 2005 - 17:02
I don't understand

Why is it google's fault If I click on a couple of ads on neowin's website every day, just to give a bit more revenue to them?

Surely the people who click should be sued. I don't see how google would be able to prevent it.

Can someone explain please? Or have I misinterpreted the article?
Quote this comment #2.1 Posted by Julius Caro on 30 Jun 2005 - 17:05
I find the click system a total fraud. Anyway can google do anything about it?
Quote this comment #2.2 Posted by Ned on 30 Jun 2005 - 18:18
QUOTE
...I click on a couple of ads on neowin's website every day, ... Surely the people who click should be sued.


Well...okay then.


After reading your post again I can see I read it wrong. Replace the word "if" with "that" and it changes the meaning entirely

I can't think of any way that an advertising company could stop someone from doing what you just described though.

There are people who make programs that goto x website and click an ad so many times a day.
Google should be limiting the number of click throughs coming from one ip though. After a certain number of times it wouldn't pay the site anymore for that visitor on that day....or something like that.

Now if Google has something like that in place and the company is still sueing then....

Last edited by 76077 on 30 Jun 2005 - 18:28
Quote this comment #2.3 Posted by jahanbin on 01 Jul 2005 - 15:11
I am very glad somone actually is doing this. I own a nationwide corporation. We get all of our business from advertising on the internet. Last year we spend $95,000 with google for advertising. But starting about 3 months ago we noticed that even though we are using up our daily budget we are not getting as much business as before. After some extensive research we found out that 92% of our clicks are actually from the save network. Google does not count if somone from the same IP clicks on your add twice but it doesn't care if it's all from the same network. The intresting thing is that this network is actually a network that is maintained by google for research accross several universities. The intresting thing is that these clicks are really not pulling down our website. The webserver logs act as though somone just pulled the name of the page. But we get charged for the click. AT $9/click (Some of our keywords are very popular) this can add up very quickly.
We have spoken to google several times showing them the logs and each time they admit there is a problem and credit us for the day or week. But they have not corrected the problem. I don't really care if they refound the money. I want the system corrected so I can get some real visitors to our website to generate income. We stoped advertising with them over 1 month ago and business has slowed down so much we had to lay off half of our staff. What is worst is that we beliave that one of our compatitions is really behind this whole mess.
Quote this comment #2.4 Posted by Jelly2003 on 02 Jul 2005 - 08:36
Exactly, when I read that article I thought "good on them" because there is nothing in place that protects people from this kind of thing. Google's whole business model relies on advertising, they need to look after and protect their customers otherwise they're going to leave and never come back.

I have a few Google ad-words campaigns in the works, launching soon, and fake clicks is one thing that concerns me.

Google's indexing is really annoying me, it's so hard to find anything usefull via it's normal searches unless you spend a good 5 mins fine tuning your search.

I usually just go straight for the ad-words results because they usually contain the info that I want. I have no intention of using the service that the company provides, and I am costing them money per click that I make (and also for every return visit that I make via adwords).
(1 reply) Quote this comment Reply to this comment #3 Posted by kirk26 on 30 Jun 2005 - 17:06
Go Google! Take these leeches down! Click Defense?? What a name. What next? The Ethical Treatment of Keyboards that are Touched Incorrectly Group?
Quote this comment #3.1 Posted by neufuse on 30 Jun 2005 - 17:51
*holds out a stuffed keyboard doll* now timmy show me where he touched you :p
Quote this comment Reply to this comment #4 Posted by Thorpe on 30 Jun 2005 - 17:15
I click on ads but I don't necessarily do business all the time.
Quote this comment Reply to this comment #5 Posted by Toastyone on 30 Jun 2005 - 17:20
I have actually done this, click on an ad just to charge the company money, but what they don't say here is once you click most of the time google keeps track of your Ip address and if you click again it will not charge the company
Quote this comment Reply to this comment #6 Posted by FouZ on 30 Jun 2005 - 17:31
We should find their ads and all together click on them! If you want money... get a real job !
Quote this comment Reply to this comment #7 Posted by Blackima on 30 Jun 2005 - 18:08
/me clicks on all the ads on this page and then closes 'em

^_^
(1 reply) Quote this comment Reply to this comment #8 Posted by nic on 30 Jun 2005 - 18:30
First of all, an advertiser should pay based on how many unique visitors saw their ad, not how many people actually clicked on the ad. This is easy to do. Secondly, I think if an advertiser wants to gage how effective their advertisement is on a particular web site they can simply track the user from the time they clicked on the ad to actually purchasing a product. Then they can asses how many unique users saw an ad, how many of them clicked on the ad, and then how many user actually purchased something as a direct result of the ad. If their web programmers can't setup something that will do that then they should all be fired.

Wow! Holy Freaken Crap! Advertisers never had it so easy.
Quote this comment #8.1 Posted by Geo on 30 Jun 2005 - 23:18
I'm kind of shocked Google only charges advertisers by click, I got the impression ALL agencies charge by the 1000 views (or so), and the person with the ads on their site gets $$$ per click, giving Google excellent revenue. I've always used CPM, rather than per click, the payout is smaller, but there's more of it, good for high traffic sites.
Quote this comment Reply to this comment #9 Posted by Julius Caro on 30 Jun 2005 - 18:50
Of course the company can 'track' an user that comes from an ad. But I don't think google would accept that. As I had said before in a post regarding neowin ads, those companies who advertise have the same rights as those who are using ads to pay a hosting or whatever. It's nice that people click on ads to support a website, but that's a fraud if they close the page as soon as they got into it.


Quote this comment Reply to this comment #10 Posted by ObCeeDee on 30 Jun 2005 - 18:58
Surely if Google doesn't have a system to block clicks from the same ip's if they show up several times a day, it's their fault that they get sued.

But what I don't understand is that they describe "clicking fraud" as users clicking their ads without the intention of doing actual business with them. If that were true, one click means one sale, now where's the logic there?
Quote this comment Reply to this comment #11 Posted by Ravensworth on 30 Jun 2005 - 19:07
Welcome to the United States of Frivolous Lawsuits.
Quote this comment Reply to this comment #12 Posted by Julius Caro on 30 Jun 2005 - 19:36
I think this company is right. It's not googles fault (IMO) that people don't give a f about their products or whatever. The should have decided to stop using adsense instead of suing google. If it ain't working, stop payin for it.
Quote this comment Reply to this comment #13 Posted by TheSarge on 30 Jun 2005 - 20:40
Hey, you can't blame Google if you didn't bother to understand the service you agreed to pay for. It's all there in black and white in the service agreement (the contract).
(1 reply) Quote this comment Reply to this comment #14 Posted by Epimetheus on 30 Jun 2005 - 22:33
*Clicks all of the Ads on Neowin*
Quote this comment #14.1 Posted by webeagle12 on 30 Jun 2005 - 23:15
Quote this comment Reply to this comment #15 Posted by TruBD on 01 Jul 2005 - 00:57
5 million is prob nothing to google
Quote this comment Reply to this comment #16 Posted by SonicSam on 02 Jul 2005 - 18:18
As someone who places google ads I have learnt to not bother including content sites (Sites like neowin) in my googleads config as click fraud is rife, as an example when I turned on content sites for one adword catagory my click-though rate exploded and my conversions plumetted, now I only advertise on the search engines and keep my keywords very targeted.

You guys may think its helping Neowin out by clicking on the ads but in the end of the day its just damaging the whole adword system and putting people like me off advertising at all. No advertisers willing to pay then no revenue for neowin.
Quote this comment Reply to this comment #17 Posted by SonicSam on 02 Jul 2005 - 18:27
I almost forgot, click here to visit WiredEyes Internet Consultancy (My company) and come buy my services (or not). At least i've not paid for the privalige of your visit, even though you may have had no intention of even looking at what I have to offer and simply did it to make someone else (mainly google) a little extra cash.....
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