Click fraud
type of fraud that occurs on the Internet in pay per click online advertising
Click fraud is a type of ad fraud that occurs on the Internet in pay-per-click (PPC) online advertising. In this type of advertising, the owners of websites that post the ads are paid based on how many site visitors click on the ads. Fraud occurs when a person, automated script, computer program, or an auto clicker imitates a legitimate user of a web browser, clicking on such an ad without having an actual interest in the target of the ad's link to increase revenue. Click fraud is the subject of some controversy and increasing litigation due to the advertising networks being a key beneficiary of the fraud.
Media entrepreneur and journalist John Battelle describes click fraud as the intentionally malicious, "decidedly black hat" practice of publishers gaming paid search advertising by employing robots or low-wage workers to click on ads on their sites repeatedly, thereby generating money to be paid by the advertiser to the publisher and to any agent the advertiser may be using.
Pay-per-click advertising
PPC advertising is an arrangement in which webmasters (operators of websites), acting as publishers, display clickable links from advertisers in exchange for a charge per click. As this industry evolved, a number of advertising networks developed, which acted as middlemen between these two groups (publishers and advertisers). Each time a (believed to be) valid Web user clicks on an ad, the advertiser pays the advertising network, which in turn pays the publisher a share of this money. This revenue-sharing system is seen as an incentive for click fraud.
The largest of the advertising networks, Google's AdWords/AdSense and Yahoo!
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This entry incorporates text from “Click fraud” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.