Last week, Business Week had a great article on click fraud. The writers did a great job detailing the issues with the paid-to-click (PTA) businesses working with domain parking services to make click fraud happen. One additional angle I would have liked to see in the article is the angle on competitive click fraud. Competitive click fraud is when company A pays somebody to click on ads for company B, in order to drain company B of its resources. I am not sure if such an arrangement would even be illegal besides being difficult to prosecute.

After reading the article, I wanted to leave a comment at the BW site, but they have comment moderation turned on. So after leaving the comment I got a message saying that my comment will be reviewed by somebody in 24 hours…There isn’t much I hate more than having to wait 24 hours to get into a conversation. Anybody else had the same experience? On the other hand though, I guess BW has to be careful about the spammers. Also I guess being a established old business, they probably believe in erring on the side of caution then free flowing discussions. I am not really upset with BW as this is an issue facing most established brands…short of moderating/censoring the discussion there really isn’t a way to ensure a good quality of discussion.