Click Fraud? Don’t Forget about Impression Fraud
Wednesday, October 14th, 2009
Impression fraud is alive and well.
While most media outlets have shouted the alarm bells about click fraud over recent years, we shouldn’t forget that the old stalwart of online advertising fraud still exists: impression fraud.
The Wall Street Journal recently reported about recent examples where web sites would show “invisible ads”, inflating the number of banner ad impressions for companies such as Kraft Foods, Greyhound Lines and Capital One Financial.
In one example, MyToursInfo.com opened forty invisible web pages, each with 3 ads each. That’s 120 fake impressions.
The Wall Street Journal couldn’t track down the owner of MyToursInfo.com (which has shut down), but historical whois records show that the site was owned by LinkedNetwork Co., Ltd of Juneau, Alaska.
Impression and click fraud is most easily perpetrated when there are many layers between the advertiser and the publisher. In many networks, the publisher actually deals with a sub-affiliate of the advertising network, creating many degrees of separation to the actual advertiser.
Further Reading:
Click Fraud? Don?t Forget about Impression Fraud – http://tinyurl.com/ylmlak9
Has there been any talk or proved services or practices that stop this type of fraud?
This is a trillion dollar problem and getting bigger by the day – everyone needs to take this very seriously. If anyone is interested in impressionfraud.com, please contact me
seriously though – big companies waste so much money on this kind of stuff in the name of “branding”. I know a guy who freely admits that when his company (publisher) needs inventory they’ll call up a shady pop under partner and deliver a few million impressions in a day.