More on click fraud

SEMPO conducted a study about click fraud that shows it is a great concern among marketers:

Pay-for-click is a key driver behind the growth of online advertising, but now marketers are asking how many of those clicks are bogus.

The growth of the Internet as a communications, commercial, information and entertainment medium has been phenomenal, but for all the excitement and optimism that has caused, occasionally a shadow falls and the sunshine cyberworld grows dark and ominous. The newest dark cloud on horizon is click fraud.

Click fraud is not much of a concern to individual surfers, but it could become a big problem for marketers and advertisers. Some marketers are charging that search engines, the big benefactors of pay-for-click advertising, are not doing enough to protect them against the growing practice of click fraud. Lane's Gifts and Collectibles, a Texarkana, Arkansas, retailer, filed a lawsuit in February against Google, Yahoo, AOL and other search sites alleging that they knowingly overcharged Lane's and other companies.

In a survey of marketers taken late last year, the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization (SEMPO) found 77% of marketers were concerned about click fraud to some degree...