In today’s Washington Post there is another article on click fraud, pointing to both Google and Yahoo!
This quote gets to the heart of it:
”After analyzing where and when each click came from, auditing firm ClickFacts Inc. estimated that 35 percent of the referrals that Radiator paid Google for stemmed from bogus traffic. Likewise, 17 percent of the leads that came from Yahoo search results were illegitimate.”
At a time when Google is trying to reassure us that everything is fine, it’s troubling to see such high figures being unearthed.
Interestingly, the 35% figure from ClickFacts ties very closely with the figure of 30% we published in our own click fraud research a little while ago.
If the figures really are that high, industry-wide, the implications for Google, advertisers and publishers alike don’t make for a very happy picture.
