click

Click fraud, in which advertisers have to pay for bogus clicks on text ads, dropped only a smidgen to 16.2 percent of clicks in the second quarter from 16.1 percent in the first, according to new data from Click Forensics, a company that monitors such activity.

Companies including Google and Yahoo with networks to show ads with search and on partner web sites have efforts to protect against click fraud. However, the company said Tuesday, click fraud is getting harder to counter.

"Although click fraud rates were relatively unchanged in the second quarter, we found that the … Read more

Google increased its share of money spent on search ads to 77.4 percent in the second quarter, up 2 percentage points from the year-earlier period, according to new data that doubtless will interest those gauging the antitrust implications of the search leader's new advertising partnership with Yahoo.

According to the statistics from search marketing firm Efficient Frontier, which bases its conclusions on data from a specific set of large-scale search advertisers, Yahoo dropped nearly 2 percentage points to 17.8 percent of spending and Microsoft stayed level at about 4.8 percent.

Search ads are shown next to … Read more

Click fraud, or the act of clicking on text search ads for ill-gotten gains, is the nuisance of the multibillion-dollar search industry.

So Click Forensics, one of the largest independent click-fraud auditors, has teamed up with Yahoo to take some of the pain out of the process for advertisers that want to recoup costs associated with fraudulent clicks.

Click Forensics on Wednesday said it built software in partnership with Yahoo that lets advertisers automatically query Yahoo when Click Forensics detects click fraud in a search-advertising campaign. Called Factr, or Fully Automated Click Tracking Reconciliation, the software is a new feature … Read more

JotSpot became Google Sites, Writely became Google Docs, Picasa might become Google Photos. And as of this week, DoubleClick's Performics affiliate ad network has become the Google Affiliate Network as part of Google's $3.1 billion acquisition of the ad firm. The premise remains the same: publishers get a commission when someone not only clicks on their ad, but then goes on to buy something.

Right now, per TechCrunch, some of the big advertisers include Target, Verizon, and Barnes & Noble.

DoubleClick acquired Performics in 2004 for $58 million; the search advertising start-up had been around since 1998.… Read more

Iriver first introduced its innovative D-Click interface in 2005 with the release of the U10, the boxy predecessor to the Clix line. The company shows no signs of abandoning the system, which is used to full effect on its latest U.S. release, the LPlayer. This ultracompact MP3 player could be the offspring of a first-gen Clix and the S10, with its similar design and extensive feature list. But the LPlayer isn't exactly like its predecessors. It comes with a more reasonable starting price point: $110 for the 4GB and $160 for the 8GB. Read the full review.

Yahoo's CEO Jerry Yang made the rounds on Capital Hill on Wednesday, in an effort to dispel antitrust concerns surrounding its search advertising deal with Google.

During his one-day visit, Yang met with Sen. Herb Kohl, D-Wisc., who chairs the Senate Antitrust Subcommittee.

Kohl has previously expressed concerns that the deal between two technology search rivals could affect competition and have ramifications for advertisers and consumers. He noted the antitrust subcommittee plans to investigate the competitive and privacy implications of the deal.

Sen. Joe Barton of the U.S. House Energy & Commerce Committee also weighed in on the … Read more

File host Docstoc is releasing a solution on Wednesday for sending large attachments to friends, family, and co-workers. Called OneClick (download), the small application must be installed on your machine to enable right-click contextual menus that let you simply click any file on your hard drive and send it either publicly or securely to others.

Once the file's been transferred, you'll get a link to the Docstoc-hosted document inserted into a new e-mail message that your recipient can open and read without needing to install anything.

Like Scribd's solution, which launched last week, OneClick has been designed to entice business and casual users to start simply uploading their documents instead of e-mailing them for the sake of compatibility and size.

Not everyone has Gmail or Office 2007, which offer popular file compatibility. Nor have all users implemented the small software tweak on older versions of Office that will let you read those .Docx files with ease. Instead, solutions like Scribd and Docstoc are taking office software out of the equation entirely.

It's also a pretty simple way to get users uploading more of their documents from a local machine. Instead of having to go through Docstoc's Web uploader (which is simple and easy to use), you can get them uploaded with just two clicks whenever you come across something you'd like to upload.

The small application is PC-only for now, but I'm told a Mac version will be on its way soon. To see a video of the tool in action, click the link below.

… Read more

Google's U.S. paid click-through rate posted a strong performance in the month of April, while Yahoo and Microsoft gave up ground, according to figures released late Wednesday by ComScore.

Google's paid click-through rate climbed 20 percent in April, compared with year ago figures, marking its best performance since November, according to a research note by Ben Schachter, a UBS analyst.

Yahoo, meanwhile, saw a year-over-year decline of 4 percent and Microsoft's MSN saw a drop of 9 percent.

And on the click-through rate, which takes the total number of searches divided by the sponsored clicks, Google'… Read more

A Los Angeles-based law firm with a history of targeting online media companies for click fraud filed suit Tuesday against Citysearch, the directory site owned by IAC/InterActiveCorp, as well as Ticketmaster, the ticketing site that IAC is attempting to spin out into a separate publicly traded company.

"Citysearch.com is defrauding its advertising customers of millions of dollars by not only turning a blind eye to click fraud, but in fact encouraging it as well," a statement from the firm Kabateck Brown Kellner read. The class action suit encompasses anyone in the U.S. who paid for … Read more