Iyow - in your own words

Apparently, click fraud – the systematic clicking of ads/links on sites for the sole purpose of driving up revenue and marketing statistics for that website – has become a Real Problem for sites with pay-per-click ad networks, like Yahoo and Google.

SFGate cites a report by Outsell, Inc, that about 14.1 percent of clicks (monetizing into about $800 million) is bogus. Companies such as Yahoo and Google have paid out about $500 million reimbursing advertisers.

Now, from what I’ve seen, Google is pretty vigilant about that sort of stuff. I did at one point ask some of my cousins to click on ads for this site, just to see what would happen, but they caught us at about the $11 mark. Admittedly, I do have a lot of cousins.