Wikipedia states the following:
Contextual advertising is the term applied to advertisements appearing on websites or other media, such as content displayed in mobile phones, where the advertisements are selected and served by automated systems based on the content displayed by the user.
As a content publisher I have the possibility to put ads on my blog and earn a few bucks whenever a visitor clicks on the link. Since I’m to small to be targeted by any advertising agency or advertisers directly (which is proven by the lack of text-link-ads on this page) the contextual advertising is the only way to go.
The goal of contextual advertising is to display ads targeted at the reader of the content and in the case of blogs also the creator / owner of the blog. This essentially means that whenever I check my blog to moderate comments, write a new post or just to check what’s going on I’ll see ads that target me directly. When I see such an ad I’m invited to click it and I sometimes do – when the ad is interesting enough. I click on it as I would click on the same banner if I saw it on any other page.
If we try to see this from the other side – the advertising network will pay me for every click anybody makes on any ads on my blog. Actually the advertisers pay for the ads and a part of that money is passed on to me as the content owner. This means that I could easily place ads on my blog and earn money by just clicking on them. Obviously they will want to prevent such action. A local advertising network ToboAds does this transparently – they told me that they registered a few fraudulent clicks and that it constitutes a breach of their TOS – if I continue to do this they’ll throw me out of the system. I wonder what Google does…
So they’re targeting ME and not letting ME click.
As I talked with a guy from the ToboAds team today it made me think whether I could find a favorable solution for all parties. I understand that this might be hard but how about this – I could only use the money I earn from clicking on “my” ads for buying ads on the same network. Of course if the amount is relatively high there need to be other measures – we wouldn’t want ad networks to charge us for clicks some freak did on their own blog.
I’d really like to know how these guys (oh, and these guys) do it.
Speaking of using your so-called “self-clicks” (eg. clicks made on ads of pages you publish your publisher’s key on) to fund your own ads brings up a deeper issue – you’d essentially be channeling the funds from an advertiser who DID pay for that click (any any displays that happened, mind you!) to pay for your own.
It’s hard to judge motives, which is all that it boils down to it anyways – if the advertiser’s spending on those displays and clicks that you made made an impact on you, then it’s a valid and justified click. However, most publishers that do click on their own ad frames, tend to do it profusely and without discrimination, warranting doubt of their true intentions.
Basically, if someone’s selling something and you get it from them for free, they usually expect you not to sell it to someone in turn as a courtesy, especially if you’re given a hefty amount of it. In the real world, if you managed to sell the goods, you’d be given free money – but on the web, that money is converted into traffic when advertisers pay for the service and in the end, you get potentially free traffic or raised awareness (if you burn off the funds on just displays) that someone else paid for. It doesn’t seem all that fair to the payee, does it?
So it all comes down to motives. If that individual made clicks out of his own geniune curiosity, then that’s funds that were procured by legitimate means. But since server logs don’t imprint thought (well, not yet anyway), we’re stuck with the age-old guessing game.
Better to be on the paranoid side, though – advertisers like to see their money effectively spent. Happy customers bring more happy customers, which in turn means more money to sprinkle around, so that makes publishers all the more happy.
Anyway, nice write-up, nice to see people thinking of the challenges of edge cases in interactive advertising.
Or you simply wouldn’t earn money from clicks you’ve made. This is what Adsense does and they don’t nag you about “fraudulent” clicks as long as you do it rarely enough. I believe that rarely enough means that compared to statistically expected success rate of those ads you don’t stand out too much.
Marko I don’t agree, Adsense is known for its merciless when it comes to self clicking – exclusion being the punishment. It’s the non-fraud culture they want to build… and we have the same goal. So we want to teach people they have to follow the rules (TOS) and we have with warnings for that…
The problem if you don’t count the self-clicks and you don’t nag about them are user questions in terms of “what is wrong with you system? it’s not counting clicks!”. We had this strategy and we received this kind of questions …
Now we have warnings and people learn. It’s not perfect, but it’s working.
I’ve also learned that you can make ads go into “testmode” where the server won’t count any hits on them. In WordPress you could do this for logged in users easily…
That’s why you have things like statistics and probability. The question is do I click on ads exceptionally often or within reasonable probabilities of doing so. If it’s former, then I’m probably trying to game the system, if not, it’s more likely that they do interest me.
Personally I don’t see a reason why I wouldn’t get paid as a publisher for non-fraudulent clicks I generate as a customer, but I feel fine if they are simply ignored. As they — speaking from first hand experience — definitely are in Adsense. I would dislike being treated as fraud when it should be clear I am not.
If I shouldn’t click on them in any case, then don’t show them to me personally. You do know when I am on my site. Or to enable debugging, show them without links on which to click on.
You can also notify users why some clicks are ignored right where you show them that they are.
You could also do what most banks or credit banks do in cheap dubious cases. Pay the site owner but don’t charge the advertiser as long as there is a reasonable amount of such clicks. Really just a cost of doing business. An investment in good will so to speak.
Of course what you’ll do is at the end completely up to you.
We’ve seen what being on the paranoid side did to RIA or Microsoft – I don’t think that in the long term it pays to be on that side. The excuse that logs don’t show whether I’m interested or not and what my motives are does hold, but only if you’re looking at them one line at a time.
I’m sure people that study social sciences could tell you how you figure out whether a person is sincere in his actions – if you have enough information that is. It’s up to you to use that information in a way that helps you help edge customers like me.
@ego: Yes (tentatively), given enough data, you can use profiling via pattern matching and/or frequency analysis to speculate as to whether the user’s actions were motivated by greed or just plain interest.
But the problem here, like in every business, is not what’s being done – it’s how it’s handled and presented to the people who invest in the technology and consume its services and products. After all, like AdSense, ToboAds strives to create a fair network whose customers have confidence in, the opinion they have on how charging is evaluated being key.
While the term paranoia may not be appropriate here, we do tend to see a great deal of defensiveness here when it comes to customers paying for the service – they want to get as much ROI from the investment as they can, and the only measure of success with spending in advertising is the apparent rise in interest due to advertising. It’s harder to explain why ToboAds would let publishers click on their own ad spaces than it is to say that we take away the motive of publishers burning cash on their own ad space (which does not include extensive clicking by others – but that’s handled elsewhere).
Kinda like people that work at an organization throwing a sweepstakes, for example, aren’t eligible for prizes, even if they buy a ticket – the point being that people involved in the business process could affect the fairness of the sweepstakes. Granted, there’s nothing random about ad spaces, but the same logic applies here too.
Ok – don’t pay me for my own clicks and don’t charge them to the client.
To make your last argument about the prize winning game stick you’d have to add that the prize game would target the people at the company and their friends.That’s sort of what you’re doing here – targeting me and my friends (readers strictly speaking).
@marko The self-made clicks are of course ignored, but this users are later on excluded because of TOS violation. Last time I check this was very strict policy, lots of publishers being excluded on this account.
@ego The motivational factor of someone putting ads on their blog is not to target himself, but to target visitors. To track intent of one user who clicked on the ads is hard, but we can make good guess on what is the intent of the vast majority of the ad hosting site owners is -> to make money.
Krof Drakula made a good point. It is also my belief the ad network should strives to create a fair network whose customers have confidence in.