The current issue of BusinessWeek (October 2006) has a cover story about "Click Fraud" that will surely put more pressure on the major Search Engines, Google first and naturally Yahoo.

If you don't know what is click fraud, please take a look at what Wikipedia is saying about it. They already have the link to the businessweek article.

There is not much more in that BW article than what was described in the last january issue of Wired. Stories showing the problem for small to medium companies, description of the future threats and confirmation that we (Yahoo) take the problem very seriously and invest to implement solutions.

There is at least two interesting information item anyway. First, the announce that most of the click fraud comes from affiliates and not our network, and that a very good percentage is coming from "parking web sites". Those are web sites hosting thousands of domain names their owner don't want to use for the moment and making them serve ads from Yahoo or Google as a way to benefit from the free hosting. Second, the importance of groups of people clicking on ads for payment, those people being a lot more difficult to discover than an automatic fraud click system.

It is natural, like any other successful new business, that the CPC model haves its predators profiting from the system without providing any value to anyone outside themselves. We will do whatever we can to stop them, but I hope anyone will remember how many wonderful and useful services the CPC system is funding before saying that it should be stopped because of fraudulent clicks.