Some number of years ago I wrote articles for Fool.com or some blog portion of it. I don’t even know if they have that site or any portion of it anymore. I actually got along with one of the people I reported to, so not a bad experience.
Then, one day, when management was changing hands or some such thing, I created and submitted a post saying Google made a lot of money on click fraud. I had dutifully found all of these message boards with people claiming they were making $15K, $30K or more per month with a series of parked domains and some convoluted method of getting them indexed which caused impressions and clicks to happen. What was striking was I didn’t find any corresponding posts from advertisers about getting refunds or anything of the sort for click fraud.
What peaked my interest was my own brush with this some years prior. I had just released one of my books and opened up an AdWords account to promote it. I read through all of the stuff and keywords I wanted had these massive click prices so I had to poke around to find cheaper stuff. Remember, this was an experiment, not a course of action. I set some small monthly budget of $50-$150, exact number I do not know. What I do know is I needed a stopwatch to measure just how long my monthly budget lasted. I set things up before supper and remember my entire budget was gone when I checked after supper. I bumped my monthly budget a few more times over the next few days only to have it magically disappear without any traffic increase to the book site or additional sales.
Exact details/content of the article escape me, it was a number of years ago. I don’t even have the original article, at least I don’t believe I do. (When your network storage device hits 4TB in size can anyone really remember it’s complete content?) I do remember the current Capo di tutt’i capi busted a gasket and wouldn’t allow such an article to be posted wherever my stuff was being posted/syndicated at the time.
Needless to say, we parted ways. I don’t even remember who “he” was which should tell you just how often I read the informational emails from on high. When a client is paying me to create a specific document, say one or more SDLC documents, I do just that. When people are paying me to “create content” I create the content I like and investigate things of interest to me. If you like it, fine, if you don’t, my life will not change. If the article or book was something I wanted to research, my life is better for having done it. Sorry yours didn’t improve.
Yesterday, April 14, 2017, this landed in my inbox.
Kind of says it all, doesn’t it?
