I picked up on a story from the Market Watch site titled “Search Advertisers Willing to Live with Click Fraud” written by Ben Chamy. The gist of the story is that most search marketers shrug off the cost of click fraud as a cost of doing business, and as long as they are profitable, they consider click fraud to be a nuisance, but not much more.

I think the article does reflect many of the feelings search advertisers have about click fraud, but it does leave out the most important reason we put up with it - and being “willing” has nothing to do with it.

Quite simply, if a search marketer decides not to advertise with Google, they are effectively losing their ability to reach over half of the search market. And that is something that no one is willing to do.

I would liken the search landscape to the world before cable TV. Search advertising right now is like the old days when everyone in the United States had TVs with three channels to choose from (although in this case one of the channels is much bigger than the other two).

Now lets say that in the three channel world you wanted to buy TV advertisements to get the widest reach possible. If that were the case you would need to be on all three channels, right? Well, search advertising is basically a three channel world as well…and if you arent on the biggest of the three, you are missing out on a lot of traffic.

I guess what I am trying to say is this - search advertisers put up with a lot of things like click fraud (poor user interface on Yahoo and MSN and terrible customer service at Google come to mind) but no matter what abuse we take we cannot afford to lose the traffic we get from the big three. So we write it off as a cost of doing business. It doesnt mean that we like it - and it does not mean that we dont care.

As search marketers we are not willing to live with click fraud - we just have no other choice but to live with it.