• ClickZ, Monday, March 13, 2006 10:30 AM

It may come as no surprise that experts believe that Google itself is the biggest winner from search giant's recent click fraud settlement. It's kind of obvious, really, if you look at this way: for about 15 percent of the company's 1.5 billion in revenue last year (which should be near 2.5 billion next year), Google has effectively rid itself of all click-fraud-related issues in the past four years. Oh, and by the way, Google will be repaying those advertisers through advertising credits, not cash, and thus reinvesting in its own system. The same experts are telling ClickZ that it's also not such a bad deal for advertisers, either. Since "click fraud" is not an established legal concept, it would have taken a while, to say the least, for prosecutors to explain to the judge what click fraud is and how exactly Google is in breach of content. One analyst says the risk belongs to the plaintiffs: they could either risk not getting anything, or stop now and take a sure thing. One problem with advertisers' decision to accept the $90 million payoff is that it leaves the idea of the actual volume of click fraud occurring on Google's network in the dark; Google's business product manager has maintained the number is "very small," but repeatedly refuses to put a number on it. Even so, some search marketers don't believe click fraud is that big a problem, but they say the engines could do a much better job of being transparent about how often it's occurring and what categories are most at risk.

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