Click Advertising - Fraudulant Setup

[turtl]

I am in Australia, but I reckon it would apply to everywhere. I read my local papers online everyday (usually www.smh.com.au and www.australianit.com.au). I am careful to not click on the page or the advertising and I have pop-ups blocked.

However I notice that are times when regardless of what I do the page just does it's own click, opening up a advertising page.

I suspect that, like me, many readers just want to read the news of the day and don't want to be bombarded with ads. So to combat this, and to increase click revenue, the webpage creators have made the page act as if it has been clicked. :o

Surely this is wrong and the companies who are advertising must be made aware of this scam? :P

[Frazzle]

There's really no regulation of what happens on the Internet.

What you can do is to use Firefox as your web-browser, and use its Ad-blocker and/or Javascript block plug-ins.

[John Fairheart]

How is this either 'fraudulent' or a 'scam'. If you do not like the way that a website circumvents the protection you have enabled in your browser you do 2 things:-

1) Complain to the website.
2) Do not visit them.

[Daneel]

Actually, there is such a thing as click fraud :) but it's the advertising companies that suffer from it:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Click_fraud
And yes, if what you say is accurate then those websites are probably breaking a rule somewhere, and the advertising companies would like to know about it.

[John Fairheart]

Well, you learn something new everyday.