• October 23, 2008

Traffic from botnets reached 27.6% of all click-fraud traffic in third-quarter 2008, up from 25.2% in the year ago quarter, according to a report by Click Fraud Index, which tracks click fraud based on data from search providers, industries and trends.

The report, released Thursday, looks at industry pay-per-click (PPC) fraud figures for the third quarter 2008. The overall industry average click-fraud rate was 16.0% for third-quarter 2008, down slightly from 16.2% for both second-quarter 2008 and third-quarter 2007.

The average click-fraud rate of PPC advertisements appearing on search engine content networks, including Google AdSense and the Yahoo Publisher Network, was 27.1%--a slight decline from 27.6% in second-quarter 2008 and the 28.1% in third-quarter 2007. In third-quarter 2008, the greatest percentage of click fraud originating from countries outside North America came from Russia, 4.9%; France, 4.8%; and the U.K., 3.5%. --Laurie Sullivan