Pay per click programs sometimes too good to be true?

default — by TDavid @ 12:43 pm PST

Once upon a time, there was an online casino named Cyberthrill : http://www.o-a.com/archive/1998/July/0006.html that promised to pay 20 cents per click (initially it was raw click, but later it was changed to simply “click”). Almost all webmasters flocked to sign up for it at the time. Nobody paid that much for raw clicks with raw meaning any clickthru, even multiple clickthrus from the same IP/cookie/session within a 24 hour period.

Most Pay Per Click (PPC) programs pay their affiliates based upon unique clicks which depending on the program, usually means one credited click for every unique IP/cookie/session within a 24 hour period. Raw clicking is so easily abused that no program in the history of the web that I’m aware of, has legitimately been able to pay over a penny per raw click. Usually it’s like 1/2 a penny, if that, for raw traffic, and even in those cases there are serious limitations and conditions put on the source of those raw clicks which make it a hybrid of unique and raw clicks.

As soon as the reality came that they weren’t paying a lot of their affiliates for, you guessed it, ”fraudulant activity” affiliates starting leaving the program in droves and disgust, and most with some sort of account balance being owed.

I’ve not seen a PPC (Pay Per Click) sponsor currently paying what Google is paying — unique or raw — on average and be able to keep the deal running long term. I’ve mentioned this on my radio show before that I’m both excited about their program and a bit concerned about its solvency at the same time.

But if anybody can do it, the wizards at Google can, right?

Cancelled, scorned affiliates at Cyberthrill were so angry over the situation that a guy by the name of Munga Bunga created a javascript to sign up five members at a time to the database and it circulated the net via a DDOS ultimately closing the program

I am hoping that Google knows what they are doing, but there is definitely concern there that they will not be able to sustain the payment level with this program, simply on the fact that nobody before them has been able to do so. But then again, they have been able to create a search engine that produces more relevant results than most that have come before it.

Still, one has to wonder if this is de je vus or a crack in the glass?

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