1. It is nice to see a company like MostChoice.com (one of our competitors) taking the time to raise hell with Google and Yahoo!. Hopefully this will get some attention to insurance vertical when it comes to bad clicks.
2. I appreciated that the article focused on dirty content networks more than the old companies-clicking-on-competitors-ads kind of click fraud (bad click karma). While this type of thing happens, I don't think it as big of a deal as the content partner problem.
3. It is great to see that Google and Yahoo! continue to stick with their "we filter out most questionable clicks but we can't really tell you much more" line. Eventually, no one is going to buy this line, but hey, seems to work right now.
4. The conspiracy theorist love click fraud as a subject...as they should (see number three). The veil of secrecy the search engines keep up only fuels the fire.
5. It does seem strange to me that advertisers can see that a lot of these bad clicks are coming in from foreign countries, yet the search engines still argue that they are good clicks, even if you are just set up to advertise in the US. Seems like a pretty easy problem to fix.
6. Never overestimate the intelligence of click fraudsters - you've gotta love the couple that "dabbled" in click fraud to the tune of about $5,000 - and now they are telling BusinessWeek about it and are using their real names (as far as I can tell).
7. And to add insult to injury the patriarch or the click fraud couple says - "Whatever Google and Yahoo! are doing [to stop clickfraud], it's not having much of an effect." If this guy can figure it out how to dupe Google and Yahoo!, who can't?
8. It is amazing to think that 15% of all of your clicks are fake. Imagine how much your conversion/earnings would increase as an affiliate if all of your clicks were clean!
9. I would have liked BusinessWeek to mention that advertisers can be a angry as they want, but there is no alternative to Google and Yahoo!'s traffic. So is the pickle that advertisers are in - and the search engines know it.
10. And finally...there seems to a one infallible way to prevent getting charged for all of these bad clicks - avoid content match. Yes, I know that kind of sucks, but if you really hate click fraud, that will protect you from a lot of it. Internally, we do some content match, but it is not a widespread thing and has always been hit-and-miss at best. One thing I would say is if you are using content match, make sure you are using some type of conversion tracking application that can show you if your content clicks aren't converting. With that information you can weed out some of your more problematic keywords.

So what were your impressions from the article? Are you scared? Are you unworried? Are you pissed? Leave us a comment and let us know...