Lets face it, pay per click ad networks suck. They are 100% pure crap. For starters, most of them are still at the stage of banning you if you accidentally click on your own ad. And lets not forget the little problem with click attacks. PPC ad networks could be greatly improved if they implemented 3 simple things, that is all. Just 3 things.
Don’t Count User’s Own Clicks
This is one thing I have never understood. If the ad networks know if you click on your own ad, how come they don’t simply remove any funds generated by the click? They would have to add in maybe 10 lines of code to do that.
Now I can understand banning someone if they repeatedly click on their own ads (10 times a day), but the little one or two accidental clicks should not get a user booted. What is even worse is companies like Google who withhold entire checks of $1,000+ because a user accidentally clicked on their ad once.
Don’t Allow Click Attacks
There is no reason why there can’t be any preventative measures to keep a user from clicking on ads on a website more than X times in a single hour. What would it take to do this? Maybe an extra database column, and about 10 to 20 lines of code. It doesn’t seem like it would be a hard feature to implement.
Disable Ad Viewing For Certain IPs
In addition to the above to issues, disabling ad viewing for certain IPs wouldn’t be hard either. They could add in a small listbox where you can ad your IP, proxy IPs, etc. If a user that is on a network with that IP visits your site no ads (or at least placeholders) will be displayed. Again, it doesn’t seem like it would be hard to implement.
So why don’t the major ad networks have any of those features? It’s mind boggling.
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