More Google AdSense Controversey
Hey! Didn't we cover this first? Here and even here? But now others are getting into the act. "Tom Foremski wondered what would happen if someone created a treasure hunt with a large cash prize awarded to a single click of an unpublicised adwords ad. A subsequent clicking frenzy could drain advertisers' accounts, prompting them to ask for a refund. This hypothetical idea is part of a more serious problem - pay-per-perfomance advertising is open to fraud - when you click something, money drains out of an account - this doesn't happen with TV, print or radio ads. See Adbombing.

"In the same way that companies like Paypal spent a considerable proportion of their resources dealing with fraud, so will Google. If Google succeeds then its anti-fraud measures will be a competitive edge. If it fails there will be a problem. The moral to all this is that Google's business model landed on their laps via Scott Banister at Idealab, it is a new model and its weaknesses are not yet exposed, let alone tested."

Maybe that explains why they got so mad at us.

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