Click Fraud Reaches New Record High

F My Life: It's Funny, It's True, Except When It Happens to You

According to a new report from Click Forensics, approximately 17.1 percent of all clicks on web ads are the result of click fraud - the act of clicking on a web ad to artificially increase its click-through rate.

Click Forensics is a company that specializes in monitoring and preventing internet crime. They say that click fraud is now at the highest levels the company has seen since it started keeping a record of it back in 2006. Analysts had been hoping that it would hold steady this year - this clearly is not the case. The company had recorded a rate of 16.3 percent in the first quarter of last year.

What's more disturbing is that over 30 percent of these fraudulent clicks is now coming from automated "click bots". This represents a 14 percent increase from the fourth quarter of last year and is, once again, the highest rate Click Forensics has yet seen.

Click fraud for advertisements on Google AdSense and Yahoo Publisher Network was up to 28.2 percent (up from 27.1 percent last quarter), though that figure has dropped from the 28.3 percent recorded in the fourth quarter of 2007.

Click Forensics states that they are now seeing a revival of such old tactics as "link farms". Certainly, these wonderful economic times in which we are living is not helping the matter any.

CrunchBase Information

Click Forensics

Information provided by CrunchBase