On 10/24/05, Poe, Marshall MPoe@theatlantic.com wrote:
Anthony Wrote:
"I did just think of another potential problem with Google Adsense in particular, though. It may provide incentive for certain people to insert certain keywords into random articles to draw competitors away from the pages they want to advertise on (and thus lower the cost to appear on those articles). I'm not sure if it'd work or not, though."
I don't really follow. WP contributors would not gain anything by trying to increase traffic/click-throughs on articles with bogus key words, would they? Contributors wouldn't profit from AdSense at all, would they? All the money from AdSense would flow to the Foundation, right?
MP
Well, there are two reasons click fraud happens. One is when you click on ads on your own website to boost your own revenue. That one is pretty easy to detect and stop. But the new one that has emerged with Google Adsense is where one company will click on the ads of its competitors in order to run that competitor out of money. Their position in the list of ads will then increase, because their competitor is out of money and can't advertise any more.
I was trying to think of how this type of abuse could be done if Wikipedia used Google Adsense, and that was the best I could come up with. Not sure if it would work or not though, it could in theory be stopped by Google's algorithm when it notices that even though a page has certain keywords it isn't providing a good CTR for certain of those keywords.