Click-Fraud and Advertisments

http://www.forbes.com/technology/2008/03/17/click-fraud-yahoo-tech-security-cx_ag_0317click.html?boxes=relstories

Advertising on the Web has grown widely with the exponential growth of the Web. Advertisers pay for results based on a cost-per-click model, where they only pay if their ad is clicked on. Second Price auction helps determine what their costs are because there are different places the site could put the ad on, and all have different values.

The article takes this and talks about how there are some people who make fraudulent clicks which end up increasing advertising revenue and ends up draining a competitors budget. The article specifically discusses Yahoo! and how they have dealt with click-fraud. They found out that every year, the click-fraud rate increases by about 2%. The article also goes in depth to talk about the role of Click Forensics that collects data in order to calculate fraud and potentially offer some sort of solution to this.