[Foundation-l] Answers.com and Wikimedia Foundation to FormNewPartnership

[Anthony DiPierro]

On 10/24/05, Poe, Marshall <MPoe at 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.