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$5 submissions · 09-27-2004, 04:56 AM

Great Post! THANK YOU

Quote:

Originally posted by herbal logic
Complete Article, worth a read http://www.marketingcynic.com/ppcfraud/

SOMEONE'S MAKING A LOT OF MONEY FROM YOUR PPC BUDGET

WHAT A PITY IT ISN'T YOU
"Have you ever wondered where all your non-converting traffic is coming from?"

This article explains where your Pay-Per-Click advertising (PPC) budget really ends up.

I really don't know why people bother with PPC engines when all their advertising money ends up here anyway.
-Carole Stacey, Paid-to-Read program owner

The Paid To Read Email biz, IS In Fact, a ppc Parisite, and I Really think we'd All do ourselves, And our Industry a Great Service, if we were to, On a Mass Scale, Accept this, if somewhat putrid, Stark Reality. -MadMeikal, member of Paid-to-Read programs

A little background
I was using several of the top feeds to advertise various affiliate and lead generation programs when I noticed that my results were steadily worsening to the point where the advertising was becoming unprofitable.

Being somewhat technically inclined, I traced back the logs - to smaller "partner engines" - but I still couldn't figure out where they were getting their terrible-quality traffic from. There was a lot of it, but there were no specific usage spikes pointing to click fraud and nothing I could complain about - and all the while my accounts were steadily dwindling to the point where I had to pull them because all my ad money was being wasted with nothing to show for it.

I started looking into alternative advertising, and found something called "Paid-to-Read-E-mail" (PTR) that promised targeted advertising to an interested user base.

Well, mailing lists are cool, right? Just to be on the safe side, I joined some programs to see what was being advertised through them - always good advice to keep up on what's being repeatedly advertised through programs, right?

I also found a forum dedicated to this "industry," as it likes to call itself.

And suddenly I realized where all my non-converting traffic was coming from.

Much of the information here has been compiled by both joining Paid-to-Read programs myself, and by reading through Getpaidforum.com and quoting comments made by members.

Usernames on that forum are not readily traceable back to "offline" identities. Where possible I have traced back usernames of Paid-to-Read (PTR) program owners. Quotes in this article are attributed to forum usernames. The quotes have been left "as is," without correction to grammar or spelling.

Problem Summary
1. Intro - PPC Profit Sharing.
A nice idea in theory, offer an incentive for webmasters to place search boxes on their web sites.

2. Feeds.
Offer a way to bid on PPC placement on multiple search engines since their results feed out to many smaller engines.

3. Third-Tier Search Engines.
Accept search feed results from the larger feeds to supplement their own results.

4. Affiliates of These Engines.
Get a share of the profits based on click-through rates, with a higher profit share for people who deliver more traffic through their sites.

5. PTR.
People being paid to be traffic. Nobody takes this crap seriously, do they?