A private detective from the Bay State Detective Agency has filed a law suit in California Court against Google for advertising in third party websites. If the lawsuit wins, Google would have to end up paying millions of dollars.

Bay State Dectective ageny private investigator David Almedia informed that the company had signed up for Google Adwords. However, he wanted to advertise only on Google search engine and not on websites like MySpace or personal blogs.

He also mentioned that while setting up the budget for advertisement, he had left the text box blank thinking that a blank box means he would not be charged and that his advertisements would not be displayed.

Google has earned $1.7 billion from advertising in the first quarter of 2008. It should also be noted that Kabateck Brown Kellner had filed a suit against Google for Click Fraud and Google ended up paying $90 million in settlement in the year 2006.

However, this sue by the private detective does not seem to have a strong base to fight against Google. It is a well known fact that Google also displays the advertisement in its other websites apart from the search engine like Blogger and also on third party websites.

Click Frauds are clicks made on advertisements with the sole intention of creating a charge for the advertiser without an intention to know about the site or make a transaction.

PPC companies have informed that millions of dollars are lost to click fraudsters and PPC companies have taken up major measures to restrict or bring to notice any computer, bots or automated programs which indulge in this practice. Read More »

Click fraud is the use of illegitimate ways to make money from a Pay Per Click program. The fraudster would either click on the advertisements on their own sites themselves or use automated programs to click on the advertisement.

It is estimated that around 14.6 percent of all pay per clicks on ads are being done using fraudulent ways. This has cost $800 million in the year 2005 alone.
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Considered one of the highest settlements ever, Yahoo Inc informed that it would refund money to thousands of advertisers as early as January 2004. However, the agreement would not limit Yahoo’s liability.

Preliminary approval was given to the agreement by the United States District Judge in Los Angles.

Due to this outcome, Yahoo has assured that it would work with others in the industry to come up with an agreement on what constitutes a click fraud. Read More »