Click Fraud is rising, especially on search engine networks such as Google and Yahoo. According to a report on the Click Fraud Network, 15.8 percent of all clicks for the second quarter of 2007 were fraudulent, an increase of more than 1 percent over the previous month.

The news is more grim for AdSense customers, as more than a quarter of the clicks on search engine nets were bogus.

Sites that exploit AdSense and botnets were assumed to contribute to the continued rise in click fraud. While advertisers can expect some losses due to fraud, 25 percent is well beyond an acceptable margin, and more companies are likely to bolt from PPC networks faster than you can say "Michael Vick endorsement."

Google et al. must do a better job at staying one step ahead of the bad guys if they want PPC to be a viable offering.

The wall between broadcast and online TV has fallen. CBS is going full force with its Interactive division licensing content to every video service worth a darn including AOL, GooTube, Veoh, and Joost, according to MediaPost.

CBS has been the most aggressive network in understanding that it is better to use the web as asset than to attempt to protect its television programming. Quincy Smith, president of CBS Interactive, realizes that it is more important to build brands online and hope that it increases the TV audience and acknowledges that people spending more time at the keyboard is the real threat. "We are not competing with 'American Idol' as much as 'LonelyGirl,' which is being downloaded everywhere," Smith said, per MediaPost.

CBS is dealing from strength as the company controls ad sales and is retaining a whopping 90 percent of all revenue. That also shows how badly the YouTubes of the world want professional video.

So we can expect the other networks to quickly follow suit (lookout for Fox/MySpace), and more unique content being available online. If you can't beat 'em, join 'em.

Local directory companies have been busy in the last week forming partnerships and acquiring companies in this increasing competitive market.

Local.com bought PremierGuide, a company that specializes in business listing services for publishers. Local.com will fold PremierGuide into its private label LocalConnect service for newspapers and other local publishers.

I didn't realize that my newspaper's website (www.oregonlive.com) even had a local business search because it was so hidden on the website. As classified dollars are lost to online competitors, this service will probably become more prominent on newspaper sites.

Idearc Media signed up Neighborhood.com and Jingle Networks as partners to display its SuperPages.com listings, while YellowPages.com has redesigned its website.

The trick for local businesses is figuring out which of the local directories are best able to promote their companies. Right now it is overwhelming to know which services to choose (also including Yellow Book and local services from CitySearch, Google, MSN, and Yahoo), so continuing consolidation is probably good for business owners.

A startup is creating a people-centric search engine that will be maintained by a community of users. Spock.com takes information from social sites such as MySpace, LinkedIn and the public web and builds profiles around people.

Jaideep Singh, Spock.com CEO, told me that their are 30 million searches each month around people, and generic search engines such as Google don't do a sufficient job because they are focused on search terms and not people.

People can claim their own profiles and make corrections and add tags, and Spock's users can rate the tags associated with people up or down to provide more accurate information. For example, if someone is known to be an avid surfer, then that tag can be voted up by users to build the association, while if the term "vintage cars" is not as important, it can be voted down to not appear on the list of tags.

Spock.com, which is currently in invitation-only beta, will rank the images and pages most closely associated with each individual. It can be searched by profession such as "actress" or "venture capitalist."

The greatest technical challenge for a people search engine is filtering through the common names to make sure that the correct information is associated accurately. My profile (there are about 21 people in the U.S. with my name) had some incorrect data (such as making me 9 years younger -- if only), but the information is easily corrected by community members or profile owners.

People-centric search could generate significant traffic if done well. For Spock, accuracy will be dependent on an active community willing to maintain the data.

Google is no longer allowing search engine Sharogle to run its ads because the revenue was being shared with partner sites, according to Mashable. I'm wondering if the company's name (ending with -ogle) had anything to do with the decision?

Getting blacklisted by Google can mean certain death to small companies because of their dominance, and it will be interesting if a future lawsuit challenges Google's licensing policies for running AdWords.

Google has lots of killer tools for integrating custom search into websites, which I plan on taking advantage of. Google's custom search engine lets you search a specific set of websites for content and add your own layout. To me, this is incredibly powerful, allowing publishers to deliver to their audiences content from hand-picked sites.

The next step would be to offer a search of RSS feeds so that you can locate news from only the sites you watch. This should be in the works today since Google acquired FeedBurner not so long ago. Google should put this to work on their iGoogle page, as well as updating Google Reader to allow the search of feeds, like you can do in FeedDemon.

My company, Matter Media, has been co-producing a website called Chasing Glaciers that follows the trek of two female athletes as they climb mountains in Pakistan to document global warming.



We thought that creating an interactive website that follows the journey of two extreme athletes through blogs, vlogs and photos as it happens would be unique, and we had hopes that the videos would spread virally. Boy were we wrong.

The website has gotten very little traffic, because no one gets that this website is tracking an ongoing expedition -- everyone I've spoken with about the site assumed that it was a documentary about some past trip. So why didn't we get traction? Was the story boring? Does no one care about glacier melt and climate change? Does no one believe that vlogging can be done from 20,000 feet? Is the design that uninviting?

We put the videos on YouTube and MySpace, but got nothing, and the same goes for the press release that we distributed. We thought that with An Inconvenient Truth, Live Earth, etc., and with interest in extreme sports (via free skier Alison Gannett and climber Zoe Hart) that the world would have been ready for ChasingGlaciers.

Please tell me, how did we miss the mark so completely?

Competitors are checking out shopping engines and scooping up the best buys. ValueClick purchased MeziMeida (owner of Smarter.com and CouponMountain.com), and last month a majority of NextTag was purchased by Providence Equity Partners.

A new generation of shopping engines is using Web 2.0 technology and social networking functions such as consumer product ratings to put pressure on the dominant engines such as Shopping.com and Shopzilla.

I'm actually surprised at the lack of advertising these search engines do. For all of the web surfing I do, I hardly ever come across a display ad for a shopping portal (enough with the insurance and refinance ads!), and I hadn't heard of many of the smaller engines. Because the sites carry such vast inventories, shopping engines don't buy many top keyword spots because it is too expensive. Or maybe it's that the ads are so lame that I don't even notice them? Shopping engines should be spending more than they are online and online if they want to grab people's attention. Advertising more on MySpace and the other social sites with targeted ads based on the content being read would be a good start.

Depending on how you look at it, Google has either greatly shortened the time during which it records your search history data, or not done much at all. According to Wired's Threat Level, the time that Google saves cookie data for accounts that have not been active from more than twenty years to two.

If you haven't accessed Google from a browser for more than two years, the odds are you'll never be using it again, so that is a positive move for privacy. But as Threat Level reports, new users are still automatically having their search history tracked by default.

Google also keeps search queries in their log files (via IP addresses), so there is still a trail to be had. The best solution for respecting privacy is to encrypt all personally identifying information in files that can only be unlocked by a user's PC. The government may not like that, but a search warrant that includes home/work computer would still give access to the necessary information.

Google recently added an "impression share" metric to its AdWords analysis, and while it is good to know what all of the advertising opportunities are, don't let the fact that your ad isn't being seen at every single opportunity scare you into overspending.

The impression share metric provides data on all of the times your ad could have been seen if you had an unlimited budget and ranked highly so that your ad came up on the first page for every relevant search. While larger companies can aspire to blanketing the world with ads, I think it is much more important to get the most out of the ads that you can afford.

It is possible that if you maximized your budget, your click through rates and ROI might go down since some of those ads might not be the primary demographic, website, or time of day for your business. Making the most of your natural rankings is a better plan than trying to outspend everyone by bidding higher (see the Yankees for a case study).

SEMDirector suggests day parting and better keyword targeting as other methods for increasing impression share.

Remember, the goal isn't to get the most impressions (a hollow stat), it is to get the most customers per ad dollar spent.

VenturaBeat and TechCrunch are covering this story regarding the lawsuit that has been haunting FaceBook for 3 years now. Some former Harvard Business School friends of Facebook founders are saying he stole the code and business plan from them and they wanted their piece of the pie.

Now, it would be safe to say that almost zero of the MarketingShift readers were in school when TheFaceBook was making its way around college campuses like I was in 2001-2002. In addition I am also Co-owner of a small network of online college communities so when I heard of theFaceBook I took an extra particular interest in them. More specifically, I was curious to how they were growing so fast and how all these people in Eastern North Carolina had heard of them.

We spent a good amount of time trying to analyze what they were doing to generate this buzz and after enough digging we uncovered the secret behind their "viral marketing" campaign. First off, I'm sure FaceBook will adamentally deny what I'm about to say but I'm sure a lot of people who were hit by this campaign would be able to validate my story.

TheFaceBook, as it was originally known, was able to spark a long term growth pattern in a way that most people have been unable to find success: Spam. That's right, I said it, TheFaceBook was a big time spammer. They just did it a bit differently than others have. What they would do is connect to a University's LDAP directory where all the students contact information was stored. For those who don't know what LDAP is here is a brief description. LDAP or Lightweight Directory Access Protocol, is an Internet protocol that email and other programs use to look up information from a server.

Once they successfully connected to a server, which was not hard because many were left insecure, they would snag all the information they could and begin their campaign. They wouldn't spam everyone they would only send emails to the underclassmen asking them to "check out this site" or sometimes would ask the kids to send the email and link on to their classmates and so on. The biggest reason this would work was if students were passing it on to other students it seemed more genuine. I have the emails somewhere and if I can find them I will post them.

At the time, this type of viral marketing was pretty new compared to today when every new "web 2.0" app has an "Email This to a friend" feature so it would result in a completely different situation if they were just starting that type of campaign today. TheFacebook definitely made the most of their spamming efforts and combine that in with the impact of using AIM profiles to promote TheFaceBook and you have a viral marketing campaign with enough power to generate one of the top 20 most visited sites in the US. *According to Alexa

The new royalty payment scheme for webcasters goes into effect today, but the SoundExchange group that collects fees offered a compromise olive branch on Friday. The group proposes a maximum $50,000 licensing fee, and lower fees for webcasters who encode their music with digital rights management software (DRM).

Many webcasters are expected to shut down or scale back because of the higher royalties, and these compromises may not be enough to get them back. This will have the ripple effect of decreasing exposure to new music online, which is how many people listen to music today.

Wired outlines the compromise agreement, while DigitalTrends discusses the DRM software and how it shuts iTunes out of the equation. I doubt that the DRM requirement will also be imposed upon broadcasters who are transitioning to the higher quality digital transmissions, so Internet users are unfairly being targeted. CDs, Satellite Radio, and soon digital radio are all easy ways to pirate music, but webcasters are being held to a higher standard because of peer to peer network file sharing online.

This is slamming the door in the face of the younger audience that buys most of the music, and will only further agitate those who break the law by pirating music. Webcasters pay for music through advertising or subscription fees, and a percentage of people looking for new music who can no longer access these services will likely get their music illegally from peer networks.

Just like baseball has turned off its audience by blocking out access from cable and satellite carriers, the music industry is putting short term profits ahead of a long term strategy of embracing its audience. And fighting the tide rather than surfing on top of it is bad marketing.