Henry Blodgett, an analyst and scapegoat of the dotcom bust, (ironically) writes a bearish piece on his blog about click fraud, Google's deep dark secret, and how exposure of just how big a problem it
is could send its inflatable stock price plummeting. Blodgett points out that while Google has lots of fun, free products, it has only one source of meaningful revenue: AdWords. Being so heavily
dependent on one product will hurt should something bad happen to AdWords. Enter click fraud, the process of deploying programs illegally to click on ads in order to drive up competitors' costs or, in
the case of AdSense, to create a windfall for a Web publisher by using a program to click on its own ads. Blodgett warns that Google's price is so inflated that if the wheels were to stop turning
suddenly due to poor return on investment, marketers would stop using Google, keyword prices would decline, and Google might then tumble like a house of cards under the weight of its inflated stock
price.
Read the whole story at Internet Outsider »
