Researchers Study Click-Spam, Devise A Way To Fight It

Click-spam has recently evolved to become a tangible problem in the digital world. Commonly dismissed as Internet mischief, Click-spam is actually a much greater problem and runs the risk of seeing millions of dollars of ad revenue misappropriated by heinous ways.

Addressing this issue, Vacha Dave, Yin Zhang, and Saikat Guha have composed a paper titled Measuring and Fingerprinting Click-Spam in Ad Networks. The purpose of the project was inspired from the unfair relation between the number of clicks and the return on investment for the advertiser. This observation led the Researchers to delve deeper into the problem in order to better define quality of traffic on ad networks.

 

The ground-breaking work published in the paper, scrutinizes the click-spam problem and provides the first independent methodology for advertisers to effectively measure click-spam on their ads. In addition, the paper proposes an automated method for ad networks to detect click-spam. The researchers also supported their study with a widespread measurement survey across 10 prominent ad networks and four kinds of ads.

The paper will be presented in Helsinki on Aug. 15 as a part of SIGCOMM 2012, the annual conference of the Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on Data Communication.

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