Waking The Sleeping Giant.

Publicated on : 1192604434
Theory: If all advertisers from Google lose trust in Adwords, Google would be ruined, because an estimate is that 99% of Google's revenue lies in Ad serving. That is around $6 billion-a-year. If webmasters stop making use of Adsense, Google loses a big network to serve ads, which means also drop in revenue. Either way, they will be screwed.

Google remains the great friendly search giant for most. Who doesn’t like Google? They give away free email, statistics, webhosting and also a good free search engine, but what if that climate changes? What if the truth about Google will be made public one day? What would happen if the news came out that 50 to 60 percent of all clicks are fraudulent? Google will face problems if that would happen. Google states that they have only 2% clickfraud that goes unnoticed. That may seem a low figure, but it isn’t low if you do the math on $6 billion dollar. The 2% Google talks about is hot air, it is way more than anyone ever thought. And it will rise even more in the coming years. I like to take you on a journey, a theoretical threat that could be real someday.


Waking up.

Google serves up ads to website owners, they in term embed a small piece of Javascript that is fetched from a remote server. This Javascript performs some basic logic, sets cookies and logs client information gathered by that Javascript, like screen-size, plug-ins, IP address, and etcetera. The click cookies, -as I like to call them- are homing devices that sit in your browser. Google render those cookie vectors in their database, and are profiling click behavior with it. This way, they think they can battle click-fraud. Without the cookie data and IP address, Google has nothing to identify or correlate you on. So Google faces problems in click fraud because more and more browsers allow us to block cookies, surf through proxies, anonymize ourself through Tor onion network, and some providers also give out random IP addresses every time you join the Internet. Basically, Google's model is flawed, for the reason that they can never be accurate on their own data. If Google's customers knew the incapability of Google's tracking system, would they still spend $1 to $100 dollar clicks? I doubt it.

Still, everyone trust Google, remember? Can we really trust Google? My answer is No. We cannot trust Google to be accurate because it is impossible to tell humans apart from machines on the Internet. Further more, can we trust Google on their policy regarding click-fraud, and moreover, they have the power to alter all click data themselves. I believe the only way to ensure your integrity is to let a third party process statistics and payments. That way, Google can be transparent and also raise more trust, because customers can