Blogatin vs. Schmidt: The Truth That Hurts So Badly in Click Fraud Theory

The core truth of life is what is actually at the bottom of every successful venture. This universal truth of CHOICE, on most occasions, could be very hurtful to many, a stubborn dreamer, who refuse to wake up, out of their fantasy land, back into our real world.

Donna Bogatin (a former investment banker and university instructor) is a blogger on Digital Micro-Markets ZDNet.com and posted a piece "...LET IT HAPPEN..." on the 9th July, 2006, in which she imputed that Eric Schmidt, the Google CEO, suggested a perfect, self-correcting economic solution to click fraud, and that is: "LET IT HAPPEN".

Google through a spokesman, Shuman Ghosemajumder, had come out to deny this imputation by Bogatin. Google said that her CEO was quoted out of context and that Schmidt was only responding with an hypothetical scenario to a question posed by a caller on, if there is any economic, rather than technical solution to the problem of click fraud.

Bogatin has 'fired-back' frowning at being commonly referred to as a blogger without identity and without reference link to her blog's url on the same subject by Google. She countered that Google is only being indignant and disagreed with the casual dismissal of her blog post as 'misleading' by Google. That, she contends, would not change fact of her position. It is however noteworthy that, belying this dispute is the raging but silent battle for supremacy between Google and Yahoo. A quick study of Bogatin's blogs shows that she is objectively on the Yahoo side of the 'divide'.

'Theory is grey my friend, but the tree of eternal life is ever green' says and old philosopher. As industry stakeholders: publishers and writers, what should be our position on this matter? What we must first recognise is that, most of us subscribe to the excellent services of these two giants. To use the contentious issue of click fraud to score points in this battle would be short-lived. The ultimate victor in the battle of demand and supply is CHOICE, victory is not won on the basis of sentiment, not even on the platter of righteous indignation!

Who doesn't know that both giants go to great lengths to protect advertisers and fight click frauds from denigrating our industry? Schmidt has been reported several times as calling click fraudsters "smart but evil people" and he continually declares with pride that it is fun to always be a step ahead of the fraudsters in the race.

The hurting and bitter economic truth of click fraud problem in our industry is that, all activities of "click-criminals" and competing or rival "click groups" help to nullify one another in the long run. Google and Yahoo only become relevant in the short run, with their click fraud detection techniques. It is no gain to counterpose the short-run measures against the overall long-run results. Both work out to the same ultimate goal. it is precisely the gap between the short and long run that Google, Yahoo and others have risen to fill with their different detection techniques. So why "knock their head against each other"?

Our sentiments and fears that Google's "inaction or inadequacy" to tackle click fraud may erode integrity and confidence in the industry does not hold water. In fact they are impotent in the face of the choice of advertisers, who regularly, successively, and progressively have been increasing their advertising budgets, by reason of previous successful campaigns. That is one answer that will always expose our articulate impotence and silence our unfounded fantasy. Nobody argues with truth because it is one. If you collide with it, you will break into pieces, if it comes against you, you will be grounded to powder. No sentiment and semantic can toy with the power of free choice in a market economy!