Over at the Freakonomics blog, they’ve been talking about click fraud. It began with this alarming report that 16.6% of all ad clicks are fraudulent across the industry and that in the case of Cost-per-Click advertisers like Google and Yahoo it was 28.3%. They’ve since followed it up with a post where Google explains that their algorithms are quite good and that they estimate that only 0.02% of clicks that pass through the network are fraudulent.

The challenge for the reader is to determine whether to believe the report of the “independent auditor” ClickForensics who offer third party click validation services and so have an incentive to skew high or to believe Google who, of course, have an incentive to skew low. In the end it doesn’t really matter, as long there is a mechanism to mechanically pay out money for clicks (or displays) there will be an arms race where shady publishers try to game the system.

Guys, this is exactly why we decided to stop selling advertising on these ridiculously open-to-abuse pricing models! There’s a Better Way!

-Tim

This is the official Project Wonderful blog.

We’ll be using it to announce features, discuss tips and tricks for using the service and generally try to keep on top of all things Wonderful.

I’d like to start with the new features that we rolled out on the 12th.

First off are the new 300×250 rectangular ads. Quite a few publishers requested this size and we’re happy to oblige! They look like this:

With the new rectangles, we’re now offering 7 different formats for your ads and ad boxes (you can see them all here).

The other thing we’ve added is the ability to suspend your ad boxes. Say you want to take your site offline for some maintenance, you can deactivate your ad box, which will suspend all bids on it. When you reactivate the box, any bids that haven’t expired will reappear. These options are available under “My ad boxes” -> “Edit ad box”. This allows you to signal to us that your site will be down for a while. We won’t send our robot back until you’ve reactivated your ad box!

Our robot will still be diligently checking on all publisher sites to make sure that the ads are displaying properly. If a site goes down unexpectedly, or a publisher forgets to suspend the box, then the robot will suspend bidding as normal.

Email us at service@projectwonderful.com if you have any questions!

–Tim