If you earn money on the internet by posting articles, recipes, pictures, or anything else that pays you when people look at it, you should know what click fraud is. On the internet, advertisers pay for their ads by the number of times they are viewed or clicked on. From your perspective a click would be anytime someone looks at your post, and the articles are present.
Click fraud happens when you find a way to generate large quantities of traffic to your site that does not result in anyone seeing the ads that would have an interest in them. A computer can be programmed to visit the same site over and over. At computer speeds, this can create thousands of clicks in a very short time. If you solicit everyone you know to visit the same web page dozens of times each per day, this also is click fraud.
When the purpose of the visit is to create income for the person hosting the ads and not to give the ads a chance to produce income for the advertiser, it is fraud. Many companies have software to monitor where the various visitors to their site come from. When a pattern of visits begins to appear from the same computers over and over, the traffic is investigated to see if click fraud is being done.
Make no mistake. Click fraud is stealing. It also weakens the ability of the internet to produce revenue. If advertisers believe that dollars they are paying each month for the ads is not productive, they will pull the ads and all revenue will be lost for the cheaters and the honest users. This practice is watched as closely as card counters in a casino.
There is a lot of money to be made on the internet. Click fraud is roughly the equivalent of a pyramid scheme. Those who are early on the scam may make some big bucks, but everyone else loses. Someone who generates an extra ten or twenty thousand clicks takes money away from those who are working for it honestly. It is possible to drain enough money from the site that they work for to sink it financially.
These companies will come after those who commit click fraud and get caught. It can result in lawsuits to recover damages. The guilty parties may very well go to jail for awhile to ponder their evil ways. Because multiple scams are needed to generate truly large sums of money, the one committing click fraud will have many companies and people after him or her.
Advertising your website is not click fraud. Finding ways to entice people to come view your site in legitimate ways is just good business. These visitors will see your material and perhaps click on the ads and support the advertisers, too. That is how the world is supposed to run.
