Is there a way to end click fraud?

You’ve seen their dizzying advertisements and probably bit the Pay-Per-Click ad phenomenon, but more and more online marketers are finding their PPC rates growing by leaps and bounds and their income from PPC ads staying at subterranean levels.

by Kristina Knight

A huge number of online scams and swindles proliferate the Internet, inflating advertising bills for hundreds of companies. Online giants Google and Yahoo have the most to lose, and gain, from PPC advertising. These are the most problematic questions facing the giants. Most advertisers don’t have a problem with the ads appearing with search engine queries, but when the ads show up on unrelated sites – some that are recycled to dummy websites that are nothing more than ads stacked one over the other on a page.

Google and Yahoo say they filter out most of the questionable clicks, but clickbots and pay to read networks make this difficult.

Internet ad spending is growing more than any other advertising medium right now. At $12.5 billion dollars in 2005, it’s expected to surge to about $29 billion in 2010. About half of those dollars are expected to be spent through pay-per-click deals.