EightBlack.

The technology blogs are running with a story this week which features Eric Schmdit, the self confessed “adult” at Google, also doubling as the company’s veritable CEO.

Schmidt states, (there is a “perfect economic solution” to click fraud: “let it happen.”)

The full article is here, courtesy of Donna Bogatin at ZD Net.

I think the folks at Google have got a seriously threatening PR crisis looming.

The challenge is no one, not advertisers, the media industry nor the actual search engines themselves have got a real handle on the actual cost of click fraud.

Some industry pundits believe its as high as US$800 million (based on 2005 actuals).

You see, Google wont reveal the “true” cost to advertisers of click fraud and I think in this day and age, to say that you should factor “bad clicks” into your advertising ROI modeling is suicide.

Google in fact make money on EVERY click - good or bad. And there lies the problem.

The industry is also talking about the fact that Yahoo! is ahead of Google on tackling the issue, but I think it’s too soon to tell and I am convinced that Google has a proportionally higher rate of click fraud than their poor search cousin.

I think Google has to tackle click fraud. It’s going to bite them in the bum if they dont.

The recent settlement (via class action) of US$90 million is chicken shit compared to what they might face if they let click fraud get “publicly” out of hand.

And Schmidt, the captain of the world’s hottest technology company, and now a public officer of the same, needs some help with his speech writing.

After all, if Googler’s are now saying within the corridors (and even publicly) that click fraud is just a part of doing business and the best way to police it is to let the crooks manage the prison, then hasn’t the company, with the mantra “Dont Be Evil” just crossed over to the dark side.

Hmmmm. Just of the tip of the iceberg. You wait and see.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 12th, 2006 at 4:57 am and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.