I suppose the well-known equation of “traffic = money” doesn’t have to be explained to the majority of my readers. I think by now, most of us know that hits and ad-clicks result in revenue. What I’m finding very interesting is the fact that if your visitors use AVG Internet Security, your AdSense revenues might just be inflated:
DoubleClick’s technology group has identified an issue in which ad transactions are being caused by “AVG Internet Security”, a free anti-virus program installed by end users. A version of this program that was released in April pre-loads / pre-fetches Web pages to scan them for viruses, spyware and malware before the end user navigates to the actual page.
When “AVG Internet Security” pre-loads or pre-fetches Web pages, it causes ad transactions (like impressions, clicks, and spotlight activities), even if a user does not navigate to the Web page containing the ad tags. An updated version of the program, released in the past month, significantly aggravates the issue.
The ad transactions caused by “AVG Internet Security” are not currently identifiable by our existing robot filters, since there is no unique user agent or HTTP header information on which we can filter. We are working with AVG to mitigate further impact of the program, and have suggested that AVG make its program-generated requests identifiable by our robot filters.
I’ve already submitted a Muti post for this issue here. You can find additional info about this on The Register:
AVG scanner blasts internet with fake traffic
it seems that Google, at least, has been able to identify the click patterns AVG uses, and for the most part, has been able to scrub most of the fake clicks out of the system. But that would still leave a considerable amount of false clicks on your ads - and AVG isn’t the only proactive malware scanner out there.
I have been wondering about this for a while. Contextual adserving on pages where content doesn’t change should result in ads that are always the same. Since most engaging visitors will likely return for commenting on blogs, they will eventually stop clicking on those ads (preferably, right after their first visit to the post). And in cases like this, those return visits will likely not result in ad revenue.
But if their antiviruses do the clicking for them…
Maybe I’m just being silly here, and not considering other dynamics, but the fact remains that adclicks were recorded as a result of this fake traffic, and companies probably lost a lot of revenue because of it. The only real question that remains is “how much”?
We’d like to thank our web community for bringing these challenges to our attention, as building community trust and protecting all of our users is critical to us. We have modified the Search-Shield component of LinkScanner to only notify users of malicious sites; this modified version was rolled out on July 8th 2008. As of this date. Search-Shield will no longer scan each search result online for new exploits, which was causing the spikes that webmasters addressed with us. However, it is important to note that AVG still offers full protection against potential exploits through the Active Surf-Shield component of our product, which checks every page for malicious content as it is visited but before it is opened.
Will not do the clicking, really?
It seems that the new version won’t, but it’s only been 3 days since the roll-out, and some people are notoriously against updating software immediately at every new patch. Maybe in a week or two, the problem would mostly have abated.
But we also have spam crawlers and other proactive anti-malware solutions out there. Maybe the issue is a little more widespread than we thought?