Trouble clicks
都是点击惹的祸

INTERNET advertising is booming. The industry has gone from $9.6 billion in revenue in 2001 to $27 billion this year, according to Piper Jaffray, an investment bank. And it is still early days. The internet accounts for only 5% of total spending on advertising, but that figure is expected to reach at least 20% in the next few years. （1）The single largest category within this flourishing industry, accounting for nearly half of all spending, is "pay-per-click" advertising, which is used by firms both large and small to promote their wares.

互联网广告业正在蓬勃发展。据Piper Jaffray投资银行报告，该产业的收入已从2001年的96亿美元增加到今年的270亿美元。这才刚刚开始。互联网广告投入仅占广告业总投入的5％，但今后几年该比例有望至少达到20％。在这个欣欣向荣的产业中，"点击付费"广告是最主要的一种形式，投入约占网络广告业总投入的一半。应用此类广告的既有大公司，也有小公司，其目的都是为了推广产品。

It works like this. Advertisers bid on keywords that they believe potential customers will be interested in. This enables internet firms such as Google, the market leader, and Yahoo!, its smaller rival, to display advertisements alongside the results of internet searches. Somebody searching for a particular type of wine, for example, might see advertisements from wine merchants. Google, Yahoo! and other firms also place ads on affiliates' websites-so wine merchants' advertisements might also appear on a wine-appreciation site. The advertiser pays only when a consumer clicks on an ad; the owner of the website where the ad was displayed then receives a small commission[1].

点击付费"广告的运作流程是：广告商竞价购买他们认为有可能成为客户人会感兴趣的关键词，使其广告出现在Google（网络广告市场先锋）和Yahoo（比Google小的竞争对手）之类网络公司的搜索结果旁。例如，有人搜索某种葡萄酒，就会看到酒商的广告。Google、Yahoo及其它公司也在与其会员网站上刊登广告--因此酒商广告也会出现在某个品酒网站上。只有当客户点击某个广告时，广告商才需要付费，然后刊登广告的网站就会获得一小笔佣金。

The benefits of the pay-per-click approach over traditional advertising (television, radio, print and billboards) are obvious. （2）Since advertisers pay only to reach the small subset who actually respond to an advertisement, the quality of the leads generated is very high, and advertisers are prepared to pay accordingly. The price per click varies from $0.10 to as much as $30, depending on the keyword, though the average is around $0.50. "Mesothelioma[2]", for instance, the name of an asbestos-related illness, is an especially valuable keyword, because lawyers are prepared to pay a lot to make contact with sufferers in the hope of representing them in a lucrative compensation lawsuit. Google made most of its $6.1 billion in revenue last year from pay-per-click advertising.

相比传统广告（电视、广播、印刷品和广告牌），"点击付费"广告的好处不言自明。既然仅当广告传播到少数真正点击广告的人时广告商才需付费，由此得到的就是具有较强购买意向的信息，广告商当然乐意花点钱了。每次点击的价格平均约为0.5美元，最低为0.1美元，最高可达30美元，主要取决于关键词。比如，"Mesothelioma"（间皮瘤，一种与石棉有关的疾病名称）就是一个特别昂贵的关键词。这是因为律师为了接洽这种疾病的患者、争取代理他们打一场可以赢得丰厚赔款的官司，很乐意出大价钱购买这个关键词做广告。Google去年61亿元的总收入中大部分都来自"点击付费"广告。

（3）But as pay-per-click advertising has grown into a huge industry, concern has mounted over so-called "click fraud"-bogus[3] clicks that do not come from genuinely interested customers. It takes two main forms. If you click repeatedly on the advertisements on your own website, or get other people or machines to do so on your behalf, you can generate a stream of bogus commissions. Click fraud can also be used by one company against another: clicking on a rival firm's advertisements can saddle it with a huge bill. Bogus clicks are thought to account for around 10% of all click traffic, though nobody knows for sure.

不过，随着"点击付费"广告发展成为一个庞大的产业，人们越来越担心所谓的"点击欺诈"--也就是并非出自真正消费者之手的虚假点击。它主要包括两种形式。一个人反复点击其网站的广告，或者让别的人或机器代替他这么做，就能产生一连串的虚假点击信息从而骗取佣金。"点击欺诈"也可用于公司之间的竞争：点击竞争对手的广告可以让对手承担高额的广告费。虽然有人认为虚假点击大概占全部点击量的10％，但这一数字并不确切。

Bill Gross, the entrepreneur who pioneered the pay-per-click model back in 1998, was aware of the problem even then. (Yahoo! subsequently acquired his firm, known at the time as Overture.) He installed a three-layered defence system: a filter to weed out clicks from known fraudsters at the outset, statisticians and software to spot suspicious click patterns, and co-operation with advertisers to enable them to analyse the leads generated and sound the alarm if necessary.

企业家Bill Gross早在1998年首创"点击付费"广告模式时就意识到了这一问题。（后来Yahoo收购了他的公司，当时名为Overture。）他安装了一个三层防护系统：先利用滤过系统将已知的点击欺诈者拒之门外，然后通过统计人员和软件审查可疑的点击样本，最后再会同广告商对得到的购买可能性数据进行分析并在必要时发出警告。

But generally the industry adopted a rather cavalier[4] attitude to click fraud.（4）Eric Schmidt, the boss of Google, caused uproar a few months ago when he seemed to suggest that the "perfect economic solution" to click fraud was to "let it happen". He was responding to a theoretical question during a debate at Stanford University, but his response reinforced the perception that Google had higher priorities than addressing the problem.

但在通常情况下，网络广告业对点击欺诈所持的是一种漠不关心的态度。几个月前Google总裁Eric Schmidt闪烁其词地说，对付点击欺诈问题的"最省钱的方法"就是"顺其自然"，从而引起了轩然大波。他是在斯坦福大学举行的一场论辩会上讨论某个理论问题时作出这番回应的，但此言一出即让人坚信，谷歌公司优先考虑的并不是解决点击欺诈问题。

（5）Such a flippant[5] attitude has not gone down well with advertisers, who are up in arms about the problem. Some have even resorted to legal action. Google reached a settlement in March with Lane's Gifts and Collectibles, a gift shop based in Arkansas, and agreed to offer refunds to advertisers who claim they have been charged for bogus clicks. Such refunds are capped at $90m, however, so many observers think Google got off lightly[6]. And in June Yahoo! promised to intensify its efforts to fight click fraud as part of a settlement with CheckMate, a fraud-detection firm. As well as offering refunds for clicks determined to be fraudulent, Yahoo! agreed to appoint a "traffic-quality advocate" to voice advertisers' concerns within the company.

广告商们根本无法接受这种轻率的态度，他们强烈要求解决点击欺诈问题。有的广告商甚至已经诉诸法律。今年3月，Google与Lane's Gifts和Collectibles（阿肯色州一家礼品店）达成一项协议，Google同意向声称自己因为虚假点击而被收费的广告商退还广告费。然而，这种退款最多也就9千万美元，因此许多观察人士认为Google被从轻发落了。还有今年6月，作为与点击欺诈检测公司Checkmate的协议内容之一，Yahoo承诺加大打击点击欺诈的力度。除了同样要退还欺骗性点击所产生的费用之外，Yahoo还同意指定一名"点击数据质量宣传员"担任广告商在该公司的代言人。

In the wake of these legal challenges, Google and Yahoo! recently joined a working group at the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), a trade association, which will establish standards for pay-per-click advertising, including the introduction of industry-funded auditing and certification, by the middle of 2007. "I believe Google and Yahoo! are now taking the issue very seriously," says David Jones, chief executive of Euro RSCG, an advertising company. But Rishad Tobaccowala, head of innovation at Publicis, one of the world's biggest advertising groups, says it is too early to say whether the measures being taken against click fraud will be enough to satisfy advertisers.

经历法律上的质疑后，Google和Yahoo近期加入了交互式广

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