An analysis of the recent DNS poisoning attacks [ via meuon ] finds that the attackers’ motivation was gaming a pay-per-click search engine.
A couple of days ago, a coworker asked me if I’ve been able to apply any of my economics training in my current profession.
Well, for one thing, I could had told you that pay-per-click creates perverse incentives for people to behave dishonestly in order to generate clicks.
And the pay-per-click people have no incentive to prevent click-farming:
FindWhat [the pay-per-click firm] has a policy prohibiting certain activities of this type [click-farming], and will likely terminate any affiliate account reported to them for abuse. However, terminating the account only means that FindWhat benefits from the hijacker’s activity without having to pay the hijacking affiliate. It’s a win-win situation for them.
Meuon declares: The real meat of the story is that the internet is not safe or trustworthy.
As long as you pay for traffic, and deflect the cost of creating the traffic onto other users, yes.
If the companies hiring pay-for-click outfits wrote contracts specifying that they don’t pay for traffic generated by affiliates gaming the system, you remove the incentive for pay-for-click firms to look the other way while their system’s gamed.
