A funny thing happened to me on the “Road to the NCAA Final Four”, that has caused me to wonder if ESPN.com is engaging in a sort of “Indirect Click Fraud”…
This year ViUX Systems was considering undertaking some sort of NCAA bracket contest with our customers as a promotion. We were unable to finalize all of the details in time to proceed with this promotion; however we will likely do something along this line next year, or during the coming NFL Football season. Despite this we are currently enjoying an NCAA bracket contest between internal ViUX employees using the ESPN.com system (I am currently in 3rd place).
During such contests it is not uncommon for you to leave the ESPN.com web site open within your browser, so that you can check your results / ranking as games come to an end; which is what brings me to the question of “Is ESPN.com engaging in a sort of “Indirect Click Fraud”. You see, in order to bring my ESPN.com browser window back to the forefront of my screen, I clicked in an empty section of the browser window that I could see, at which time I was redirected to another website?!?
Curious as to how I could have been redirected to another website as a result of clicking in an empty section of ESPN.com, I repeated the action, at which time I noticed what was really taking place. At the bottom of all ESPN.com web pages is a section entitled “Sponsored Links”, which contains from 3 to 5 PPC ads. The problem (and why I ask the question about “Indirect Click Fraud”), is that you do not have to directly click any of the PPC ads to be redirected to a sponsor’s website. You can click anywhere in the general area of the ad (above, below, or beside) and ESPN.com treats the action the same as if you had purposely clicked directly on the ad text itself… hmm.
Several months back, for another of the various ViUX website properties, we deposited $100 into the ESPN.com PPC system, and almost as soon as the ad went live, the account had been depleted to zero. When we checked our internal reporting system that we use to track our PPC click-thru's, we had received several clicks in a very short period of time, and NONE of the click-thru's resulted in anyone remaining on the site for longer than 10 seconds or navigating to any additional pages of our site. At the time we did not notice the likely reason for this; however we now see that this is almost certainly due to the “indirect click” method that ESPN.com uses for its PPC system.
Now I am the last person to accuse anyone of purposely pursuing a fraudulent course; however I have to ask if this setup is by design and for the explicit purpose of getting additional PPC clicks. If so, I consider this to be a fraudulent practice, since they would be charging advertisers for clicks that were certainly less than intentional on the part of the visitor to ESPN.com.
I could certainly be wrong, but to paraphrase one of my favorite quotes: "Just because I am paranoid, does not mean they are not out to get me"... What do you think?