They click faster in India

Click fraud is a major problem, but either nobody knows how big a problem it really is, or they are not saying.

Google and Yahoo have a vested interest in playing down the problem, the newly coined "click fraud consultants" have a vested interest in talking up the problem.

The infamous Times of India article last year tells how the "job" of clicking on adverts is established in India

Maya Sharma (name changed) gets down to work every evening from her eighth-floor flat at Vasant Vihar. Maya's job is to click on online advertisements. She doesn't care about the ads, but diligently keeps count — it's $0.18 to $0.25 per click.

Clickers say they pay $7 commission for every $50 earned.

And as they point out searching for "earn rupees clicking ads" in Google, and you get enough suggestions to keep you in rupees for months.

You hear tales of massive click fraud like this Medical Billing Software company that lost $100,000.

The market for advertising of this sort is in the region of $4 to $5 Billion, but nobody is prepared to say how much is fraud. The Cnet article quoted for the medical billing example above, is equivocal on the total amount of fraud

It's anyone's guess as to the financial liability it holds over the search engines; Google, Yahoo and others do not break out numbers on the amount of fraud detected and refunded. But anecdotally, people estimate that it could comprise between 5 percent and 20 percent of industry sales.

Problem is the evidence is only anecdotal, which means vested interests come into play

"It's a billion-dollar problem," said Tom McGovern, president of Snap.com, a relatively new search engine backed by Idealab, founder of commercial search pioneer Overture Services.

But Snap.Com has an axe to grind in over-estimating the problem. Their new service will let marketers bid for placement in Snap.com's search results but pay only if a customer buys something. And at the other end of the scale

"Click fraud exists, but it's mostly a big paranoia," said Chris Churchill, chief executive of Fathom Online, a San Francisco firm that studies the spending patterns on search engine ads.

Perhaps it is best summed up in this CNN report

"Click fraud is like a big elephant standing in the middle of the living room," said Lisa Wehr, president of Oneupweb, a search engine advertising consultant. "Everyone sees it and knows it's there, but no one is quite sure what to do about it."

But as we all know, it is an expanding business

In mid-1999, advertisers paid Overture an average commission of 11 cents per click. By the end of last year, advertisers were paying an industrywide average of $1.70 for the hundreds of keywords tracked by Fathom Online.

Ands it is expected to double in volume in the next 3 years. No doubt invalid clicks will double too.