Re: Automated Crawlers?

From: Fred Showker <DTGNews_at_aol.com>
Date: Sun 5 Dec 1999 17:52:44 EST

Sorry for responding to a two-week old post...

LAURA KRAFT WROTE:
> I'm looking for information about whether there is
> such a thing as an automated crawler that artificially
> inflates clickthru rates on certain ad campaigns, and
> what information, if any, is known about these programs.

LOL!
Laura, you're about the 50-thousandith person to ask
that question! Yup. EVERYONE is looking for such a
program. Yes, there are several, and several others in
production.

This is not a new idea, we suspect it's been in
practice by the large commerce and portal sites for a
long time on the web.

Those of you who read my post back in October, know
we've predicted the collapse of the "Click-through"
advertising model for over a year.

Then in November my 60-Second Windows column #115
spelled out some scenarios that further support this
concept. http://www.60-Seconds.com/articles/115.html

Think about it for a moment. Big sites like MSN, ZDnet,
About.com and others, who have the money, and the
where-with-all, have already set their sites up for
inflated page views. Just click the back button and
compare the page stats. Do you think they couldn't
program robots to inflate click-throughs as well? Or
wouldn't?

There are now two shareware programs available that
both click through ad banners, and log time to the "Get
Paid To Surf" programs. (Links included in the article,
or search for "Virtual Surfer"... they are very simple
to script.)

Our writers found this so curious that they decided to
do some testing, and investigation.

> One of the Web site publishers I work with seems to
> get hit with this crawler, and we think the program
> is searching for specific keywords, then checking
> the clickthru rate on the ads that come back. Has
> anyone ever heard of this before?

Yes. In fact we discovered another one yesterday which
actually intercepts your search engine clicks, and
redirects you to another site. (We suspect the sites
PAY for this service) For instance. Have a little fun
with this ... click on: http://www.photoshop.com/ and
see where you end up. (HINT: NOT on Adobe!)

What worries us most about this whole sordid affair is
that a little piece of bait ... "would you be
interested in beta testing such a robot" pulled more
response than any other in the history of the site
(1994)

Thousands upon thousands of marketers are interested in
getting their hands on a robot that clicks-through
banners, changes the IP/DNS/origin, then clicks-through
again, and again. If your banner program gives you one
exposure for every two unique click-throughs, how about
a million unique click-throughs? (If you are your own
ISP, then you know the IP numbering system and are
parly to the formula to configure all authenticated
domain click-throughs right? )

The article we're working on hopes to demonstrate the
vulnerability of the whole click-through,
click-associate, and banner-exchange standard that so
many sites have come to rely on... and we hope to
deliver some rather interesting results.

Hopefully we'll have the robot fully tested and the
article published sometime after the first of the
year. During testing, the sites we plan to hit will be
notified in advance.

Some day we hope to help people see insanity of the
standard, and in some way help infulence a return to a
more usable Ad biz.

Fred


Fred Showker
WebDesign & Review Magazine
The Design & Publishing Center

Holiday Special Now Posted:
http://www.graphic-design.com/dtg/news/




Received on Sun Dec 05 1999 - 16:52:44 CST