Revision3 commits click fraud and gets away with it!
Written on March 21, 2008 – 1:33 am | by admin
Yes, you read the title correctly. Revision3 is currently committing click fraud and gets aways with it for no other reason that they are a big publisher and when you are big you can get away with murder. While many webmasters lose their accounts for not following Google’s Terms of Service to the letter, the premium publishers cheat advertisers out of their money and Google looks the other way. How do I know that Revision3 is committing click fraud? Well, keep reading.
On March 6th, 2008, Revision3 CEO Jim Louderback wrote on their public blog announcing “Revision3 hops in bed with Google.” His post explains that the company is in the business of making money and so they have decided to sell advertising on their videos via Google’s new AdSense for Video program. AdSense for Video displays PPC ads as pop-ups in the video while it is playing; similarly, PPC ads are also shown at the end of the video. So far so good. There is nothing wrong with announcing a monetization model for content that they produce in house and is not free. The problem is that in the very next paragraph, CEO Louderback explains to readers how to help make this a profitable venture for Revision3, namely committing click fraud,
Feel free to click liberally on both the bottom-based and those end-of-video ads – you’ll be supporting Revision3 with every click!
What? Are you serious? If I wrote anything close to that on my blog asking people to click on the ads, I would have my account banned for life because this is in direct violation of the program’s TOS. Yet, the Revision3 guys can get away with it. Last I checked, Google still displayed ads in their videos.
Sadly, their viewers find no problem with clicking liberally on these ads since as one of them explains in a comment,
I do click stuff on digg.com just cuz i know it helps, so i don’t mind doing that here. So even if you download and don’t stream stop by and click a couple. Maybe we can start get Martin some ram for his state of the art built tough computer.
Funny thing, the one person who pointed out in a comment that the CEO was asking users to commit click fraud had his/her comment deleted. The whole thing is disgusting to say the least.
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