Microsoft sues three over click fraud
SOFTWARE GIANT Microsoft has filed its first lawsuit over click fraud against three people and several corporate identities they used.
According to News.com, the complaint in the US District Court in Seattle is against Eric Lam, Gordon Lam and Melanie Suen, of Vancouver, British Columbia.
The Vole wants $750,000 in damages, which is not all that much, but Redmond is sending out a warning to people who use click fraud as a way of scamming cash.
In March 2008, several car insurance advertisers started complaining that traffic to their ads was spiking suspiciously. When the Vole had a look it noticed that there were suddenly a lot of searches using the keywords "auto insurance quote". There was something similar with advertising for World of Warcraft. Clicks were coming from two proxy servers, which masked the original address of each click.
What gave the game away was that there seemed to be something similar about the links to both World of Warcraft and the auto insurance ads.
A third party told investigators that an advertiser for World of Warcraft keywords was a bloke called Eric Lam. He was also taking a fee for directing traffic to the auto insurance sites. The Vole then tracked down Eric Lam, Gordon Lam and Melanie Suen. It's up to the courts now. µ
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Want to really speed up the net. Ban Double Click, Smart Ad, and all those other damn advertisement companies. Every time you go to a page you automatically are connected and have to wait for various advert companies servers to respond.
Another way is to ban Flash outright!
There is not a damn thing wrong with, pictures with text.
Just add them all to add-block in firefox... Speeds up the intarweb bucket loads...
Or you could just host file them.
I don't think a ban is necessary. Ads are a fact of life. However, if you want to kill them off for your own computer, use ad killing software, or as I have done, use MVPS's HOSTS file to block all the ad providers. If your browser shows 404 error pages that you don't like, run an instance of Apache to make your own low-bandwidth default pages when it routes to localhost.
On another note, one thing that "accelerates" the need for me to install ad blocking mechanisms is the INQ's obnoxious Flash ads. They are/were *especially* terrible on Firefox on Ubuntu as having more than one ad appear would use up nearly all the CPU power. Content providers need to learn that annoying your audience with intrusive ads will only lead to strong measures to avoid them.
I recall an article about some loser's blog blocking Firefox users because of Firefox's ad blocking. He needed "ad revenue" he said. Well he should be thankful that he can earn *anything at all* from his rambling pseudo-journalism.
Illegal or just disreputable, this is huge, and it has major implications for PPC marketers: http://domusinc.blogspot.com/2009/06/click-fraud-and-ppc-marketing.html
Reducing click fraud and other annoying fraudulent stuff online is always a good thing. I don't think they stand a very good chance against microsofts law team.
I agree with drashek :)
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