Fighting Online Click-Fraud Using Bluff Ads

TL;DR

This paper introduces Bluff ads, a novel advertising strategy that combines targeted and irrelevant ad elements to detect and reduce click-fraud, thereby protecting online advertising revenue.

Contribution

It proposes Bluff ads as a new approach to combat click-fraud by increasing the difficulty for spammers and integrating with existing detection methods.

Findings

Bluff ads increase effort for click-fraud spammers.

Fake ads, combined with threshold methods, reduce click-fraud levels.

Bluff ads serve as a legitimacy test for ad clicks.

Abstract

Online advertising is currently the greatest source of revenue for many Internet giants. The increased number of specialized websites and modern profiling techniques, have all contributed to an explosion of the income of ad brokers from online advertising. The single biggest threat to this growth, is however, click-fraud. Trained botnets and even individuals are hired by click-fraud specialists in order to maximize the revenue of certain users from the ads they publish on their websites, or to launch an attack between competing businesses. In this note we wish to raise the awareness of the networking research community on potential research areas within this emerging field. As an example strategy, we present Bluff ads; a class of ads that join forces in order to increase the effort level for click-fraud spammers. Bluff ads are either targeted ads, with irrelevant display text, or highly relevant display text, with irrelevant targeting information. They act as a litmus test for the legitimacy of the individual clicking on the ads. Together with standard threshold-based methods, fake ads help to decrease click-fraud levels.