From the New York Times by Tom Zeller:
"E-mail has spam. The Web has pop-up windows and spyware. Even the market infant, Internet telephony, has analysts bracing for an onslaught of what is been called "Spam Over Internet Telephony," (or "spit," of course).It should come as no surprise, then - and some might say it is a bit of poetic justice - that online advertisers are becoming acquainted with their own special plague: click fraud.
The variations are many, but it essentially works like this: merchants typically pay a fee to the sites that play host to their ads whenever those ads are clicked by a visitor.
In an ideal world, the visitor, now transported to the advertiser's Web site, hangs out for a spell, examines the wares and eventually makes a purchase. In click fraud, those clicks that the advertiser is paying for are not coming from potential customers, but from scam artists, automated scripts, and even underhanded competitors."
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