Sometime back, there was a report saying that India has a large but secret army of college graduates and "work at home" housewives who are clicking Pay-Per-Click ads on the Internet (e.g. Google AdSense) to make few hundred dollars per month.In all these years, Google may have vastly improved their click fraud detection mechanisms and the problem of invalid clicks may not be so grave as before, the perception that one can easily hire cheap AdSense labor in India continues to exist.
When Google Ads publisher Mark Percival received his first AdSense cheque from Google, here's what he wrote:
Well I've officially made money from Google. And all without paying guys in India to click on my links.Similar concerns were raised when Google announced their AdSense support team based in Hyderabad, India.
Now I just need to move to a country where its possible to live on $100 a month. Rural china maybe?
Is this new team going to help them [AdSense spammers] create more SE spam? Can they help create better SERPs by educating and stopping - at least these Indian AdSense publishers from doing it the wrong way?Would you agree with the observations of these people ? Do these Ad clicking jobs really exist ? If not, can something be done to change the general perception.
Related: AdSense Toolbars on eBay
Reader Comments
I have never seen any such gangs.
The only thing I have noticed is - the informed Cafe Owners placing a custom homepage pasted with Ads on most of their PCs.
I don't think that is evil.
Written on 1/5/07 4:52 PM
When I worked on visitlab as a consultant (on stopping click fraud using collective intelligence) we had few team members who saw such ads in newspaper asking for online squad for clicking on ads. They were to investigate more about these camps but at last moment decided not to.
Certainly there are these camps, one of our team member explained the whole working of such teams. How they get dynamic IPs, different browsers and setting and even OS mixes.
It is still a difficult task to catch these squads. It is sad that India is involved, our heads go down when we hear such things.
Written on 1/5/07 9:58 PM
This is utter nonsense ! There are no 'outsourced adsense clickers' in India. Mark Percival is wrong and probably miffed at jobs being outsourced to India. In which case he is ignorant of the changing dynamics of world economy and his short-sightedness is embarassing.
The solution - ignore such people and their ramblings !
Written on 1/5/07 11:34 PM
this is ridiculous,i haven't seen any gang like this.This is a complete nonsense.
This is just few western and developed country people not ready to accept india as outsourcing and IT sector power.
Even most of the people here are not aware of adsense.I saw blogs of so many IIT students they are not using adsense at all.
The way they described it,it seems that they are american gernarals taking about terror camps in india
organised by al queda for the adsense money.
this is just rubbish.
Written on 1/5/07 11:59 PM
Google monitor technology is becoming so hard that won't be possible for such gangs to break it. It has a wide network to use it for monitoring purpose. Many organizations are looking forward to work against such spam.
Written on 2/5/07 4:20 AM
You guys are in denial. Such things do exist, I wouldnt blog about it without knowing, I live in india and the last thing I want to do is call my fellow citizens spammers. but spammers are spammers, no matter their nationality.
It's not just click-fraud that I am worried about, it is also SE-spam. many companies are advertising (ironically on adwords of all places) pre-made websites for a few thousand rupees that contain nothing unworthy keyword-stuffed content and adsense ads. for example, if you search for .. say "buy ipod nano" you'll get a spamdexed page with has, 3 adsense slots one below another with ads, and below that, you have content that says " buy cheap ipod white green mp3 mp4 mp5 player music yellow black listen..." you get the point, it means nothing - the content is there just so that the ads appear, and the pages get natural SE traffic since, users don't see anything useful on the site, some click on the adsense links.
One might say that they are ultimately giving the users what they want, but i'd argue that this is a way of click fraud. you are adding negative value to search results, not just that you are stuffing the web with pages that are basically ads, some of which, lead to pages that contain nothing but more ads - but that's another scam altogeather.
see the comments I posted in reply to the guy from the adsense team here .
Written on 2/5/07 9:19 AM
Hi Amit,
I recently came across an offer from a company in New Delhi for it. But I flatly refused it - once I realized what they were upto.
They first approached me saying they were into web SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and they could help getting more traffic into my site... Well, all this created some amount of fishy-ness within me. When I asked one of their exec's to chat with me, the modus-operandi was revealed.
So I guess all SEO's are into this same business.
Cheers!!
Jason
I blog at http://jsbi.blogspot.com
Written on 3/5/07 12:14 AM
Yep amit,
i came across another concept running in India. Its all about the agency builds a network of 1000+ websites in their list who pay them for the clicks. The agency hires employees for cheap and they are given a job of clicking 1000+ clicks per day for the same website..
So it works like if there are 100 employees working, each click a website one time per day which means 100 clicks a day for 1000 websites.... So both the company and the agency earns..
Written on 3/5/07 9:39 AM