Pose whatever theory you like as to why, but an AdWords experiment revealed that people will click on just about anything – even if the ad tells them their computer will be infected with a virus if they do.
Didier Stevens, who works for European IT services firm Contraste Group, conducted a six-month AdWords experiment to see if people would click on an ad with the text "Get infected here!" And people did, 409 of them to be exact, excluding the bots.
On his blog,
The results also seem to echo his own previous, more intensive study following AOL's Data Valdez data leak. Upon examining that data, Stevens found that for every 2800 click-throughs, one landed on a "Though the need, effectiveness, and benefits of cost-per-action models have been hotly debated, proponents of CPA billing will no doubt cite information like this, adding to click-fraud numbers for justification.
Indeed, the bottom line seems to be that the lowest common denominator (i.e., unskilled or unaware searchers) will be as present in the CPC world as the ever-hated clickbot. Chalk up the click-happy searcher as a cost of doing business, then, just as grocery stores put up with grape-grazers and hotels write off towel thefts.
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