Click Fraud Blog
StumbleUpon, Is It Click Fraud Proof?
October 30th, 2007
In my continuing series on social network sites and their click fraud benefits, I discuss StumbleUpon.
StumbleUpon (SU) is marketed as channel surfing for the Internet, it’s users flick from site to site giving the content a thumbs up or down and then move on, or stay if they like what they see.
The Stumbler (as they are know) installs a button marked Stumble onto their browser, they click on the button and they are redirected to a random website. If they like it, they click on another thumbs up button, they dislike it, the dreaded thumbs down is given. Whilst browsing the net, Stumblers can also suggest new sites for fellow surfers to check out.
The social network aspect of this system, is the creation of virtual friends on the SU main site where they can share sites, and pages they have discovered. From the main site, a Stumbler will select their interest groups, this will decide which web pages are served up to that user. The top level interest groups are arts,commerce, computers, health, living and media.
Back to the main reason of this article, the pay per click advertising programme they have created and the investigation into their claim that it is click fraud proof.
Pay per click on the StumbleUpon system works in the following fashion:
- The user creates an account
- One or more campaigns are created.
- A campaign is associated with a website URL.
- The URL is assigned to one or more interest groups.
- A daily budget is set, and funds are credited to the StumbleUpon account via PayPal.
- The campaign goes through an approval process.
Once approved the campaign is activated on the StumbleUpon network and it is served up to Stumblers for their surfing pleasure.
The real difference in the SU model is that each display of the website comes at a fixed fee of 5 cents, and there is currently no way to increase that amount in order to improve the frequency or prominence of that display.
This is a push model rather than the pull model used by Google and Co. I say this because it is the SU servers which decide which web page to display to the channel surfing Stumbler. In between paid display there will be normal “organic” displays. The algorithm used to display web pages which are paid or organic is unknown to this correspondent. A request for details has been submitted to SU but not response has been received to date.
Website owners can limit where there ads are displayed via geographic, age and sex demographics.
With the above in mind I find it difficult to see how third parties outside of StumbleUpon itself could commit click fraud, there is no way for a competitor to select your ad click on it, there is no syndication service for people to benefit from, thus removing publisher click fraud and clickbots or click farms have no say in when you ad is displayed. So in answer to the article heading, Yes I think this method is click fraud proof.
The following statement is extracted from the StumbleUpon Advertisers FAQ
How does StumbleUpon prevent click-fraud?
StumbleUpon doesn’t syndicate paid listings to third parties - the primary source of click-fraud in pay-per-click networks. We also don’t have any mechanism by which someone can force your site to come up as a paid result, so a competitor can’t drain your account.
If you would like more details on StumbleUpon paid placement visit their website http://www.stumbleupon.com/ads
Further reading Stumble Upon User Ate My Hamster.
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Tags: social networks
Posted in
Features |
October 31st, 2007 at 1:08 pm
Apart from click frauds, advertisers are very much concerned about conversions and the quality of visitors that they get. IMO, $0.05 per click is a bit too costly for the Stumbled traffic.
October 31st, 2007 at 2:01 pm
Yes, I agree that quality of the clicks can be very poor, but that is the nature of Stumblers, I prefer to use this type of PPC as a focus group to see if I can grab attention for a change to my blog or launching a new theme.