Google: Click Fraud Fixes Itself

Like John Lennon, Google CEO Eric Schmidt must have received a visit from Mother Mary, whispering words of wisdom about click fraud. Using an economic thought model reminiscent of "laissez faire" and "trickle down," Schmidt said the best way to deal with fraudulent clicks is to "let it happen." ZDNet blogger Donna Bogatin speech to Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Schmidt said the pay-per-click (PPC) model was "self correcting" when it came to click fraud. Even if there were no measures taken to detect it, Schmidt believes that: Eventually, the price that the advertiser is willing to pay for the conversion will decline, because the advertiser will realize that these are bad clicks, in other words, the value of the ad declines, so over some amount of time, the system is in-fact, self-correcting. In fact, there is a perfect economic solution, which is to let it happen. Mark Cuban, owner of blog search engine IceRocket, Though Schmidt relegate the cost of click fraud to "the cost of doing business," that cost passed on to advertisers has amounted to hundreds of