What do BusinessWeek's cover story on click fraud and the big Google/YouTube deal have to do with each other? WIT Strategy's managing partner has the answer.
Editor's Note: This article is part of our special series on Google's acquisition of YouTube, with commentary and analysis from practitioners and thought leaders throughout the industry, including:
A roundup of news from around the net
Search Editor Kevin Ryan wondering, where's the ROI?
Briefings of the deal's implications from top online marketers
Perspective on where YouTube will fit into Google's growth
A look at potential new marketing opportunities
How AdSense may be integrated within YouTube
Ranging from the 30,000 foot perspective to the deeply practical, our contributors will help you make sense of the latest shift in the media landscape.
Two major headlines brightened the media covering our industry this past week. Taken as a pair, they may presage how others will view this stage of our industry's development five or ten years from now.
The first of these headlines appeared on the cover of Business Week magazine's Oct. 2 issue. "Click Fraud-- The Dark Side of Online Advertising" told multiple stories of individuals who set up click fraud schemes all over the world, and blandly asserted that 10 percent to 15 percent of all clicks on Google and Yahoo! are fake while predicting which major internet brand was going to go public first with its own mistrust: Lending Tree.
The second of these headlines is from a story that has been leaked so clumsily that it may have well come from the White House Press Office. What has been reported since last Thursday was finally confirmed Monday. Google has purchased YouTube -- which hasn't even celebrated its second birthday yet -- for $1.65 billion in stock.
How do these disparate stories belong together?
Despite the fact that it claims more than 72 million visitors overall this past August, YouTube has been regarded with a jaundiced eye by many industry observers because of what are anticipated to be major legal battles over the ownership of much of its content.
Lately, it seems that every story on YouTube has contained a perfunctory comparison to Napster because so many people have expected the new company to be buried in the same kind of legal matters that undid one of the original file sharing innovators.
While most videos that are posted on YouTube have always been homemade, the juice -- and the controversy -- has always been in the content that is protected by copyright. But now YouTube has been purchased by Google, so all is well with our world-- at least to outside observers.
But wait a second... isn't Google the company that is at the crux of that click fraud issue? And isn't it amazing that this Business Week story I reference -- at 3,900 words, one of the longest and best-researched efforts on our industry I've ever seen in the major business press -- did not quote a single spokesperson within our industry who could speak on behalf of the industry?
When I see stories like these two, I think of the dark sides-- probably because that what I'm paid to do, but also because I wonder who is watching our backs in this industry. Are we still in the old west? Is Web 2.0 still essentially the same un-patrolled frontier that blew up in many of our faces in the spring of 2001?
Is there anyone we can trust?
Many in the media have looked to certain individuals and organizations to make sense of issues like click fraud, privacy, or other business and consumer concerns in the past. But today, it seems more likely that these guys will simply go after each other.
TRUSTe has historically been one of these entities. But a graduate student named Ben Edelman has shrewdly positioned himself these past two years as an anti-advertising activist and all-around watchdog of our industry. He probably gets quoted in the national consumer press -- telling what the media depicts as the hard truths about our business -- more than all our trade associations, industry analysts and prominent talking head from our space combined.
Mr. Edelman has posted critiques of TRUSTe's practices on his blog, and has seemed to assert a distance from any other ombudsman-type organizations as he calls out our industry in general as evil. A quick look at some of the software tools that Mr. Edelman uses to conduct his research reveals that his major resource is called Site Advisor. SiteAdvisor, on whose Board Mr. Edelman sat, was recently purchased by McAfee. But, SiteAdvisor itself has its own nefarious habits to defend.
The SiteAdvisor software blocks user access to certain "bad" sites. TopInstalls, for example, is allegedly "bad" because it contains exploits. However, how it obtained that designation is not apparent as the entity that discovered the exploit is an anonymous user of SiteAdvisor. TopInstalls may very well be a nefarious site, but that is not the point. This type of decision should be made with transparent criteria. But it is not.
More importantly, SiteAdvisor does not disclose that it blocks access to certain sites in their up-front notice when the user is in making their consent decisions. It doesn't even disclose this behavior in the EULA (End User License Agreement). It would seem like this is the type of behavior that a reasonable user would want to know about-- and one that 'good' software manufacturers would want to disclose. In fact, this would seem to make SiteAdvisor itself a kind of Badware.
Compare and contrast
Let's go back to our original two stories. #1: Google and other performance-based media have been struggling to defend themselves against claims that some bad actors can game their systems. #2: Google has purchased what may be the one player in our space that most closely resembles what the major networks have been looking for from our industry.
Not a single, credible third party from within our industry was quoted on the record in major media coverage about either the big YouTube deal or the big Click Fraud issue. The good news is that at least one of those who have made their money by criticizing our industry may have to cover their flanks, which will hopefully keep them at bay. But the bad news is that we seem unable right now to identify a suitable replacement that we -- and the major media outlets -- can live with.
Mark Naples is managing partner at WIT Strategy. Read full bio.