Pay-per-click is the fastest-growing segment of all advertising, reports the Interactive Advertising Bureau. Last year, Yahoo! alone ran more than 250 million individual listings, according to Michael Egan, the company's search-marketing director of content strategy. Yahoo! doesn't break out PPC earnings separately in its financial statements, but Goldman Sachs analyst Anthony Noto believes that keyword advertising accounted for about half of the company's estimated $3.7 billion in revenue for 2005. PPC is even more lucrative for Google. According to Noto, Google will end 2005 with $6.1 billion in revenue. About 99 percent of that revenue comes from keyword ads (over 56 percent from AdWords, according to the company's most recent quarterly financial statement, and 43 percent from AdSense), making Google a bigger recipient of ad dollars than any television network or newspaper chain. All of which is to say that little blue text links, a type of advertising that barely existed five years ago, are poised to become the single most important form of marketing in the US - unless click fraud ruins it.

If that occurs, the consequences will be felt throughout the Net. By splitting revenue with the sites that host the ads, search engines have become, in effect, the Internet's venture capitalists, funding the content that attracts people to the computer screen. Unlike the VCs who backed the boom-era Internet, search engines now provide revenue to thousands of wildly diverse sites at little up-front cost to them - PPC advertising is one of the few income sources available to bloggers, for instance. If rampant click fraud overwhelms the system, it will muffle the Internet's fabulous cacophony of voices.

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.01/fraud.html

Yea, I do some advertising on Google but I changed to be only being listed on the search engine pages because it seemed like I was getting too many click and no real business from a few web sites that were displaying my Ad.

In my area there is a saying: " Every day there is a fool that cross the street " only that on the Internet are exponentially multiplied......

In my opinion I have had better results with other ways of promoting my site other than pay per click

I don't think the click-fraud can ruin everything as the links are one per IP, therefore multiple clicks would have no effect on it.

Yes, it seems even on the most basic level simply limiting clicks per IP solves the problem.

I'm sure the big guys take it even further by tracking the IP you use to access their control panels VS the IPs clicking on your PPC ads, the normal rate of clicks for each type of ad, how many other ads that IP has clicked on on different sites, etc.

Sounds like another Wired "non-crisis". Slow news day.

Pay per click has had disastrous results for me, thanks to click fraud.

Yes, it seems even on the most basic level simply limiting clicks per IP solves the problem.

If it were that basic and simple, there wouldn't be a click-fraud problem.

Sounds like another Wired "non-crisis". Slow news day.

Not a Wired story. That clearly comes from the AP newswire. How can you say this isn't a real problem, in light of the fact that 2/3 (or so) of the threads in this forum have been related to AdSense (particularly cancellations for alleged click fraud) for the past several months?