7, 13. 2006
Newly created “Japan Affiliate Service Kyokai” by the Internet advertising industry
It remains to be seen how it deals with fraudulent clicks.
There are 2 methods for companies and individuals to generate ad revenue through Internet search type ads. One is CPC (Cost-per-click) wherein revenue is determined by the number of clicks made on the ad on the HP. Other one is “Affiliate” ad model where advertisers pay only when either the product gets actually sold or request for further materials is made after clicking. Google’s AdSense falls under the CPC ad model.
According to Dentsu, expenditure on Internet search type ads in Japan was ¥59 billion in 2005, a 1.8 fold increase over the previous year. CPC accounts for about 70% of this.
No way to “peep into the mind” of the user to know that it was a fraudulent click
Yoshiro Okada, Manager, Marketing Group Research Team of Aun Consulting says, “Contents of ads are increasing centered on blogs. In comparison to Affiliate type, which is linked with the product, genre of CPC is much wider in scope and it is going to become lot more dominant in the future”.
However, just because CPC is simple as it is based on clicks, compared to Affiliate, it has more of fake clicks and is becoming a big problem. There was group lawsuit in Feb 2005 in a local court in Ark, U.S.A. against Google, Yahoo and Lycos etc., accusing “It is unfair to make advertisers pay ad fee for fake clicks in Internet search type ads.” Google admitted the possibility of fraudulent clicks and offered $ 90 million settlement in March 2006. Even Google-world’s foremost technology group, has difficulty in distinguishing whether or not a click is invalid. Google that earns 99% of its profit from ad revenue has decided to deactivate access to an ad as a solution to this problem based on a self-determined criterion without even warning the user. This is called “Ostracizing or hunting by Google”. User who has not intentionally indulged in a fraudulent act is baffled by this but it may be effective as a “warning” to restrain unlawful act.
Mizuno who has authored “Affiliate Model– Enigma of web search engine Google” says as under:
“History of CPC at Google is not very long and it lacks experience to identify a TOS violation. Moreover, it is not possible to peep into the mind of the user sitting in front of PC to know that it is by design”.
Industry Association to curb TOS violations has been put in place but---
It is possible to destroy the site or ad of a competitor by repeatedly clicking on it by design.
Obviously, it is easy to warn if an individual is clicking from an IP address but just because clicks have increased suddenly, one cannot treat the person as a “TOS violator” based on doubt alone. An Agent who deals in both CPC and Affiliate models said resignedly as under;
“It is all going unchecked”.
Mizuno also says that, “There are few people in Japan who click out of malicious intention but in order to win the confidence, it is necessary for the industry to develop the technology and put necessary laws in place”.
Under such circumstances on 16 May 2006, Japan Affiliate Service Kyokai (JASK) was established by 7 major Internet search type ad companies such as Value Commerce and Fan Communications. Aiming at a healthy growth of rapidly growing Internet ad business, it plans to monitor violations and carry out exchange of information for protecting the general consumer, affiliate subscribers and advertisers. Undoubtedly, it will deal with curbing and preventing fraudulent clicking as a priority task.
Representative of Value Commerce, under whose initiative the Association was created says, “We are, first, trying to create common guidelines regarding violations”. However, the criterion of each company in this regard is different and the provisions have to be changed once the guidelines are finalized. There is also the barrier of the Personal Information Protection Law in exchanging the blacklist of those indulging in violations. The path of curbing violations is not all that easy for the industry.
