Click FraudWall

I mentioned Jim Pitkow's Attributor launch recently...well, he's also involved with another company that looks to be addressing something like a $900 million/year problem [1], that of click fraud. The new company, FraudWall Technologies "combines cutting edge science with the aggregation of data and characteristics from networks, search engines, and advertisers into one complete scalable solution". Very interested to learn more about how they are trying to solve the problem. Clearly there are some existing measures in place to deal with this, but they are insufficient to deal with the sophisticated attacks that have been devised (and the low-tech methods like using extremely low labor to thwart automated analysis). I imagine there are a number of heuristics that can be devised to thwart these attacks, hope they have hit on some good ones!

[1] One estimate puts the amount of click fraud at 14%. Since they also estimate that about 40% of the online advertising is click-based and they expect over $16 billion to be spent on online advertising this year, click fraud would account for some $900 million.