Traffiliate for Mobile now provides more accurate measurement of mobile ad effectiveness

When mobile advertisers pay per click, curbing click fraud is vital in delivering cost-effective campaigns

Leading ad network claims industry leading anti-fraud tool

Ra’anana, Israel – DMG (DSNR Media Group) – a leading provider of digital advertising solutions for online, mobile, and video, announced today that Traffiliate for Mobile, DMG’s platform that provides comprehensive real-time visibility of mobile campaigns,
now includes an anti click fraud solution for more accurate measurement of mobile ad effectiveness. Based on DMG’s extensive
experience in mobile advertising, serving over 10 billion impressions monthly, this anti click fraud capability identifies unwanted clicks that can result in savings of tens of thousands of dollars every month for mobile advertisers. In addition to reducing costs, this software provides a more accurate assessment of clicks, leading to better planning and more effective campaign results.

Click fraud, when a click is generated without having actual interest in the target of the ad’s link, has become a growing concern for
mobile advertisers. A Harris Interactive survey conducted last year reported that 47% of mobile application users clicked on mobile ads by mistake. Detecting accidental and fraudulent clicks for mobile advertising is more complex due to the variety of devices and browsers and the difficulty identifying unique IP addresses for each user. DMG utilizes a sophisticated system to detect suspicious patterns that can work around these technical complexities.

According to Shalom Berkovitz, CEO of DMG, “In today’s emerging mobile realm, advertisers are more likely to pay per click, and are
demanding a high level of accuracy for meeting their target audience. We are leading the industry by providing tools that can enforce a high level of integrity and trust enabling advertisers to more effectively use mobile advertising as part of their marketing mix.”

ABOUT DMG

DMG is a global digital advertising network serving advertisers, agencies and publishers.
Utilizing its unique optimization methodologies and technologies, DMG offers a full cross-platform solution for online, mobile and video. DMG delivers 40 billion impressions and over 7 million conversions each month, to over 350 clients worldwide. For more information, visit www.dsnrmg.com.

Sophisticated Attacks Target Video, Display, and Search Campaigns to Commit Fraud

AUSTIN, Texas – Adometry, Inc. (formerly Click Forensics) announced that the Adometry Malware Lab has discovered a new highly sophisticated advertising fraud scheme targeting online video, display and search advertisements. The coordinated attack, called “ad hijacking,” uses similar malware and infection delivery methods to create a network of computers aimed at committing advertising fraud through different kinds of advertisements and channels. The ad hijacking attack affects online advertisers, ad networks, and publishers. More details of the Lab’s findings can be found at: http://blog.adometry.com/.

“In the past, advertising fraudsters have mainly set their sights on the search advertising industry,” said Paul Pellman, CEO of Adometry. “This is the first attack we’ve seen that coordinates advertising fraud across many different online ad channels.”

The Adometry Malware Lab first identified the new ad hijacking scheme and malware delivery method in November 2010. Rather than requiring a user to download malware via a fake anti-virus program, the malware injects itself into the rootkit of a user’s computer through an advertisement on a popular web site or simply when a browser visits a particular web site. Once it successfully infects the computer, the malware receives instructions from a host to perform multiple kinds of advertising fraud, including search hijacking, display advertising impression inflation, and video advertising fraud. The attacks are conducted in the following ways:

Search Hijacking – when a user enters an organic search term, the malware program re-directs the browser through different ad networks and arbitrage companies. Visitors can end up on sites they had no intention of visiting, and advertisers pay for unintentional and invalid clicks. Alternatively, visitors can reach their intended destination after being rerouted through several arbitrage networks, resulting in advertisers paying for audiences they would otherwise have for free. In addition, the malware program can be instructed to auto-click on specific ads on certain publisher sites and networks even when a browser session is inactive.

Video Ad Fraud – the malware hijacks an organic search and redirects the user’s browser to a web page that displays a video ad. The video plays and the advertiser is charged for the impression, which can command premiums of $30-$50 per thousand impressions (CPM).

Display Impression Inflation – hidden in the background from the user, the malware can direct the computer’s browser to various publisher pages that show display ads in order to generate fraudulent ad impressions. The user never sees these impressions, but advertisers pay full price for seemingly valid impressions because a “real” visitor generated the traffic.

Between November 2010 and May 2011, the Adometry Malware Lab has tracked the advertising scheme across many online ad networks and publishers. While difficult to quantify, the frequency with which Lab machines were infected indicates that tens or hundreds of thousands of computers are likely infected, generating millions of invalid clicks and advertising impressions per month. The Lab has found only one antivirus program capable of identifying and preventing the ad hijacking scheme’s malicious malware program from being installed.

For more information on Adometry, visit www.adometry.com or follow on Twitter: @Adometry.

About Adometry

Adometry, formerly Click Forensics, provides scoring, auditing, verification, and attribution metrics to optimize results for online advertisers, agencies, publishers, and ad networks. Tracking billions of impressions in real-time, reporting on where they appeared, for how long, and to what effect; the Adometry mission is to bring greater levels of transparency and accountability to the online advertising industry. Headquartered in Austin, Texas, Adometry is privately held and backed by Sierra Ventures, Austin Ventures, Shasta Ventures and Stanford University. For more information visit www.adometry.com.

Adometry is a trademark of Adometry, Inc. Click Forensics is a registered trademark of Click Forensics, Inc. All other company and product names mentioned are used only for identification and may be trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies.

Now Adometry, Company Continues Expansion Into Online Display Ad Verification and Attribution

AUSTIN, Texas – Click Forensics, Inc. announced that it has acquired display ad verification technology provider Adometry of Redmond, Washington. In addition, Click Forensics announced it has changed its company name to Adometry. The moves are designed to support the continued expansion of the Click Forensics product line for the display advertising market.

In February 2010, Click Forensics launched a beta version of its cross-channel ad analytics suite for online display advertisers, which was tested by some of the world’s top brands and ad inventory providers. The integrated offering is designed to help advertisers, agencies, ad networks and publishers to manage audience verification attribution and campaign optimization through a single platform.

“The key challenge online marketers face today is accurately measuring and improving the performance of their online ad campaigns as they flow across a changing landscape of ad networks and web sites,” said Paul Pellman, CEO of Click Forensics and the new Adometry. “With the addition of ad verification technology from Adometry, our ad analytics suite integrates all the pieces of display campaign measurement and optimization in a single offering for brand advertisers.”

Over the past year, Click Forensics has continued to build out its technology offerings for display advertisers. The solution suite, which helps brands measure and improve the performance of their online display campaigns, complements Click Forensics ad analytics technology for PPC marketers. Online marketers can also use the two offerings together to manage their hybrid display and PPC campaigns.

“We’re excited to join forces with the Click Forensics team,” said John Dietz, founder of Adometry. “The company works with the world’s top online advertisers, publishers and ad networks. Our technology will enhance the current capabilities Click Forensics provides to display advertisers as we work together to build out new features for its powerful ad analytics suite.”

For more information, visit www.adometry.com or follow us on Twitter: @Adometry.

About Adometry, Inc.

Adometry, formerly Click Forensics, Inc., provides scoring, auditing, verification, and attribution metrics to optimize results for online advertisers, agencies, publishers, and ad networks. Tracking billions of impressions in real-time, reporting on where they appeared, for how long, and to what effect; the Adometry mission is to bring greater levels of transparency and accountability to the online advertising industry. Headquartered in Austin, Texas, Adometry is privately held and backed by Sierra Ventures, Austin Ventures, Shasta Ventures and Stanford University. For more information visit www.adometry.com.

Click Forensics is a registered trademark of Click Forensics, Inc. Adometry is a trademark of Adometry, Inc. All other company and product names mentioned are used only for identification and may be trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies.

New Analytics Offering for Display & Search Advertising Tracks Audiences and Performance Across Online Channels

OMMA Global Conference & Expo
SAN FRANCISCO – Adometry (formerly Click Forensics, Inc.) launched the industry’s first integrated ad analytics suite designed to help online advertisers measure and optimize campaign performance across different ad networks, publishers and media properties. The Adometry Ad Analytics suite, which has processed billions of clicks for dozens of the world’s largest advertisers in beta testing and production modes, combines ad verification, dynamic attribution and campaign optimization in a single solution. This unique approach gives advertisers a comprehensive way to measure and manage campaigns across the entire online advertising ecosystem.

“As the number of middlemen between display advertisers and audiences continues to grow, brands need ways to identify exactly where and when their campaigns deliver results so they can maximize return on ad spend,” said Paul Pellman, CEO of Adometry. “Our new cross-platform ad analytics suite allows them to do just that by tracking the quality of impressions and unique attributes contributing to success across different systems and networks.”

Adometry Ad Analytics is specifically designed to solve the unique problems online advertisers face when running display campaigns across a variety of platforms, such as publisher web sites, ad exchanges, Demand Side Platforms (DSPs) and blind ad networks. Key features available in the Adometry Ad Analytics suite include:

Ad Analytics Validate™: helps brands and agencies verify the reach and frequency of online campaigns, validating when and how often display campaigns reached their desired target audiences. In addition to providing all the functionality of ad verification and brand safety solutions, Validate goes a step further by helping advertisers pinpoint specific demographics reached, how they were reached, and which ad networks and publishers performed best.
Ad Analytics Attribute™: dynamic cross-channel attribution uses predictive modeling and machine learning to help brands move beyond ineffective last-click attribution measurement and arbitrary fractional measurement techniques. Dynamic attribution measures not only ad lift, but also identifies which combination of campaign settings – such as site visits, search ad clicks, and social media engagement – are contributing best to conversions. Attribute analyzes budget, frequency and placement data, ROAS, conversions, and reach in order to adjust campaign delivery and optimize the mix of media properties that best suit ad campaign goals. This produces better results for display campaigns.

According to an October 2009 report by Forrester Research Inc. entitled “The Forrester Wave™: Interactive Attribution, Q4 2009”: “With the science of attribution measurement getting more attention from all stakeholders, the market is poised to embrace a fundamental shift away from last-click measurement and toward a more robust form of attribution measurement that affords credit across all interactive media types, channels, and interactions.”

Since 2006, Adometry has delivered cross-platform ad campaign measurement and optimization solutions for top online advertisers, publishers and ad networks in the display and cost-per-click advertising markets. Each month, the company processes billions of ad impressions, which it uses to refine and develop sophisticated machine-learning algorithms that track and enhance ad campaign performance and effectiveness. The company’s SaaS offerings are ideally suited to meet the scalability and performance demands of real-time online advertising campaign management.

For more information on the new Adometry Ad Analytics suite, visit www.adometry.com/launch. For more information on Adometry, visit www.adometry.com or follow us on Twitter: @Adometry.

About Adometry

Adometry, formerly Click Forensics, Inc., provides scoring, auditing, verification, and attribution metrics to optimize results for online advertisers, agencies, publishers, and ad networks. Tracking billions of impressions in real-time, reporting on where they appeared, for how long, and to what effect; the Adometry mission is to bring greater levels of transparency and accountability to the online advertising industry. Headquartered in Austin, Texas, Adometry is privately held and backed by Sierra Ventures, Austin Ventures, Shasta Ventures and Stanford University. For more information visit www.adometry.com.

Adometry is a trademark of Adometry, Inc. Click Forensics is a registered trademark of Click Forensics, Inc. All other company and product names mentioned are used only for identification and may be trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies.

Rogueware Expansion Continues: Bogus Security Software Grows 13 Percent During the Half

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. – The online classified advertisement services sector has been increasingly exploited as a phishing attack vector by ecrime gangs, a trend confirmed by the growth of attacks abusing classified companies in the first half of 2010, accounting for 6.6 percent of phishing attacks in Q2 2010 alone, according to the APWG’s Q2, 2010 Phishing Activity Trends Report released this week.

Though the online payment services sector remained the most targeted industry with 38 percent of detected attacks in Q2, up from 37 percent in Q1, the classified advertisement services sector exhibited the most rapid growth in phishing attacks of all sectors in the half.

Ihab Shraim, MarkMonitor’s Chief Security Officer and Trends Report contributing analyst said, “The Classifieds sector grew 142 percent from the previous quarter and over 91,000 percent from the comparable quarter [Q1] a year ago. This sudden growth may have been due to Auction sector phishing resources shifting over to the Classifieds sector.”

Classified advertisement websites for person-to-person trading, job postings, personals ads and other kinds of online commerce and culture offer ecrime gangs rich contexts for casting false scenarios to trick consumers into giving up funds or financial data that can be used for fraud, or even to draft them as unwitting accomplices into their criminal enterprises such as working as money mules.

Meanwhile, the growth of detected samples of rogueware – malicious crimeware disguised as anti-virus or anti-spyware software – rose some 13 percent from quarter to quarter, up from 183,781 in Q1 to 207,322 in Q2, 2010.

Luis Corrons, PandaLabs Technical Director and APWG Trends Report contributing analyst, said that just three rogueware “families” are responsible for 72 percent of all the samples detected in this period:

Adware/SecurityTool was the most frequently detected rogueware family in Q2 with 25 percent; Adware/TotalSecurity2009 was second with a 24 percent; and Adware/MSAntispyware2009 was third with 21 percent of the rogueware samples detected in Q2.

The full report is available here: http://www.apwg.org/reports/apwg_report_q2_2010.pdf.

The APWG Q2, 2010 Trends Report, combining data from APWG members MarkMonitor, Websense and Panda Security with the APWG’s own statistical data, also reported:

● Unique phishing reports in Q2 2010 rose to an annual high of 33,617 in June, down 17 percent from the record high in August 2009 of 40,621 reports.

● The quarterly high of unique phishing websites detected was 33,253 in April, down 43 percent from the record high of 56,362 in August 2009.

● The Q2 high of 14,945 brand-domain pairs in April was down 63 percent from the record of 24,438 in 2009.

● The number of phished brands reached a high of 276 in May, down 22 percent from the all-time record of 356 in October, 2009.

● Payment Services accounted for 38 percent of attacks in Q2, up from 37 percent in Q1.

● United States continued its position as the top country for hosting phishing websites during Q2.

● Spain’s proportion of detected crimeware websites rose to 16 percent in Q2, from less than 4 percent in Q1.

● The percentage of computers infected with banking trojans and password stealers rose to 17 percent from 15 percent in Q1.

Though some of APWG metrics show conventional spam-based phishing attacks leveling off in the first half of 2010, field reports and statistical surveys from APWG member companies indicate that ecrime gangs are cultivating an array of alternative attack schemes: selling bogus security software to infect users PCs (rogueware); deploying website and search engine advertisements that link to malicious code or to downloader websites sites designed to infect consumers’ PCs (malvertising); crafting focused-target phishing against corporate treasurers and key personnel; deployment of advanced crimeware and social-engineering schemes crafted specifically for social networking websites and the applications that are running on them; and more.

APWG Secretary General Peter Cassidy said, “While the once-rapid expansion of conventional phishing is apparently slowing, there is every indication that ecrime gangs are expending much greater effort to design and deploy ever more undetectable, manipulative, focused and attractive schemes to defraud consumers and enterprise users. These organizations have become no less ambitious, we should note, just increasingly sophisticated and evermore deft in their criminal craftsmanship.”

APWG’s members, research correspondents and the community of counter-ecrime responders and managers will be meeting in APWG conferences around the world all through 2011 to consider and discuss the technical and criminological issues that are evident in APWG’s Trends Report at two upcoming conferences this Spring in Dublin and Kuala Lumpur.

The inaugural eCrime Researchers Sync-Up at University College Dublin on March 15 and 16 is for researchers in electronic crime as well as for responders, law enforcement personnel and technologists with an abiding interest in the technologies of ecrime and counter-ecrime efforts. Info about the meeting can be found here: http://www.ecrimeresearch.org/2011syncup/cfp.html.

The fifth annual Counter-eCrime Operations Summit (CeCOS V) in Kuala Lumpur on April 27, 28 and 29 is for responders to ecrime or managers of fraud and ecrime remediation, as well as for law enforcement personnel, technologists and researchers with an abiding interest in the techniques, trends and technologies of ecrime and ecrime response and management. Info about the meeting can be found here: http://www.apwg.org/events/2011_opSummit.html.

The annual fall APWG General Members Meeting and eCrime Researchers Summit will be held in San Diego in October, with specific location and dates to be published on the APWG website http://www.apwg.org this month.

About the APWG

The APWG, founded in 2003 as the Anti-Phishing Working Group, is a global industry, law enforcement, and government coalition focused on eliminating the identity theft and fraud that result from the growing problem of phishing, email spoofing, and crimeware. Membership is open to qualified financial institutions, online retailers, ISPs, the law enforcement community and solutions providers. There are more than 1,800 companies, government agencies and NGOs participating in the APWG and more than 3,600 members. The APWG’s Web sites – www.apwg.org and education.apwg.org – offer the public, industry and government agencies information about phishing and email fraud, including identification and promotion of pragmatic technical solutions that provide immediate protection. APWG’s corporate sponsors are as follows: AT&T(T), Able NV, Afilias Ltd., AhnLab, AVG Technologies, BillMeLater, BBN Technologies, Booz Allen Hamilton, Blue Coat, BlueStreak, BrandMail, BrandProtect, Bsecure Technologies, Check Point Software Technologies, Cisco (CSCO), Clear Search, Cloudmark, Cyveillance, DigiCert, DigitalEnvoy, DigitalResolve, Digital River, Easy Solutions, eBay/PayPal (EBAY), eCert, Entrust (ENTU), eEye, ESET, Fortinet, FraudWatch International, FrontPorch, F-Secure, Goodmail Systems, GlobalSign, GoDaddy, Goodmail Systems, GroupIB, GuardID Systems, Hauri, HomeAway, Huawei Symantec, IronPort, HitachiJoHo, ING Bank, Iconix, Internet Identity, Internet Security Systems, Intuit, IOvation, IronPort, IS3, IT Matrix, Kaspersky Labs, Kindsight, Lenos Software, LightSpeed Systems, MailFrontier, MailShell, MarkMonitor, M86Security, McAfee (MFE), MasterCard, MessageLevel, Microsoft (MSFT), MicroWorld, Mirapoint, MySpace (NWS), MyPW, MX Logic, NameProtect, National Australia Bank (ASX: NAB) Netcraft, NetStar, Network Solutions, NeuStar, Nominum, Panda Software, Phoenix Technologies Inc. (PTEC), Phishme.com, Phorm, Planty.net, Prevx, The Planet, SIDN, SalesForce, Radialpoint, RSA Security (EMC), RuleSpace, SecureBrain, Secure Computing (SCUR), S21sec, SIDN, SoftForum, SoftLayer, SoftSecurity, SOPHOS, SquareTrade, SurfControl, SunTrust, Symantec (SYMC), Tagged, TDS Telecom, Telefonica (TEF), TransCreditBank, Trend Micro (TMIC), Tricerion, TriCipher, TrustedID, Tumbleweed Communications (TMWD), Vasco (VDSI), VeriSign (VRSN), Visa, Wal-Mart (WMT), Websense Inc. (WBSN) and Yahoo! (YHOO), zvelo and ZYNGA.

Botnets and Traffic from Mobile Devices, Video Content, Social Networks, and User-Generated Content Drive Growth

AUSTIN, Texas – Click Forensics®, Inc. released advertising audience quality figures for the third quarter 2010 from the industry’s leading independent online advertising data reporting service.

Now in its fourth year, the Click Forensics reporting service provides statistically significant data collected from Cost Per Click (CPC) advertising campaigns for both large and small advertisers across all leading search engines as well as comparison shopping engines and social networks. Traffic across more than 300 ad networks is reflected in the data.

Key findings for Q3 2010 include:

- The overall industry average click fraud rate was 22.3 percent. That’s up from the 18.6 percent reported for Q2 2010 and the 14.1 percent rate reported for Q3 2009.
- In Q3 2010, the countries outside North America with significant CPC traffic producing the greatest volume of click fraud were Japan, the Netherlands, the Philippines and China, respectively.

“During the past quarter, we saw a growing volume of click fraud flow through a more diverse number of sources, including mobile proxies,” said Paul Pellman, CEO of Click Forensics. “As advertising in videos, social networks and mobile devices continues to grow, advertisers will need to pay close attention to the quality of traffic they receive.”

Since 2006, Click Forensics has published online advertising industry data collected from the first independent third-party Cost Per Click (CPC) and online advertising fraud detection service. The service monitors online media traffic across over 300 ad networks as well as billions of clicks from top search engines, comparison shopping engines, social networks, leading publishers and advertiser web sites – providing the most accurate view of online advertising audience quality.

For more details, visit http://www.clickforensics.com/resources/click-fraud-index.html.

About Click Forensics, Inc.

Click Forensics® is the industry leader in online ad verification and traffic quality improvement for the online advertising community. Click Forensics provides audience verification and traffic quality management solutions for leading online search and display advertisers, agencies, publishers and ad networks. The company also regularly publishes industry data on online advertising audience quality. Click Forensics is headquartered in Austin, Texas, and is privately held with funding from Sierra Ventures, Austin Ventures, Shasta Ventures and Stanford University. More information on Click Forensics and its offerings is available at www.ClickForensics.com.

Click Forensics is a registered trademark of Click Forensics, Inc. All other company and product names mentioned are used only for identification and may be trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies.

C. Eoin Townsend Joins as Sr. VP Partnerships and Business Development

New York, NY – DoubleVerify, the pioneer and worldwide leader in online media verification, announced a new addition to the executive team, C. Eoin Townsend, senior vice president of partnerships and business development. Previously a senior product, services and business operations executive in the online media industry, Townsend leads DoubleVerify’s partnership and collaboration with ad networks and exchanges. He has more than 15 years of experience in designing and launching products as well as in creating and executing business strategies.

Townsend previously led DoubleClick’s international business expansion and product development, and has lived in London, Hong Kong and Japan as he supported its global growth. He was also a VP and GM at ChannelAdvisor, the leading software provider that helps retailers world-wide sell more online through search, comparison shopping, marketplace development and RichMedia. Most recently, Townsend was an active consultant, investor and co-founder of MainStreetSocial, a leading brand safe network focused on local government and community publishing and monetization. He attended the University of Toronto where he studied computer science and economics.

“DoubleVerify partners with ad networks and exchanges to increase the quality of online inventory and promote trust in our industry from all players,” said Oren Netzer, co-founder and CEO of DoubleVerify.  “Eoin’s experience and expertise will help us tremendously in our efforts to ensure networks, publishers, DSPs and exchanges are well-equipped with the tools and services they need to drive change and bring more ad dollars online. We’re thrilled to have Eoin as a part of our team because he truly understands what the market needs to move forward.”

Recently, DoubleVerify announced various initiatives in an effort to bring more trust in online advertising, such as the “Advertising Fraud Detection Lab,” a team of online advertising security experts whose primary focus is to find fraudulent online advertising activities, and the first ever “Trust Index” benchmark report. With the goal of bringing accountability, transparency, brand safety and compliance to online advertising, DoubleVerify continues to be the leading technology provider for digital media verification.

About DoubleVerify
DoubleVerify (www.doubleverify.com) is the worldwide leader in online advertising verification and the top choice of marketers, agencies, ad networks and publishers looking to ensure brand safety, campaign transparency and regulatory compliance. DoubleVerify verifies over 35 billion advertising impressions per month for hundreds of leading Fortune 500 marketers. DoubleVerify is headquartered in New York City, with engineering offices in Tel Aviv, Israel. Investors in DoubleVerify include Blumberg Capital, Institutional Venture Partners, First Round Capital and Genacast Ventures.

Austin Chamber of Commerce Competition Recognizes Click Forensics for its Leadership in Helping to Improve Online Advertising

AUSTIN, Texas – Click Forensics®, Inc., a leading provider of online advertising and audience verification solutions, announced that it received the 2010 Greater Austin Business Award for the most innovative company in the small business category. The 10th annual awards competition recognized the 24 most promising young businesses in the central Texas region. Click Forensics was honored for its pioneering work to enhance trust and performance in online advertising.

LOS ANGELES and NEW YORK – Traffic Marketplace, a division of Epic Media Group, announced its partnership with ad verification firm, Adometry, to deliver effectiveness metrics and online display ad verification to advertisers and agencies. This partnership underscores Traffic Marketplace’s commitment to ensuring advertisers reach, target, and engage their ideal audience on the highest quality websites.

Chris Pirrone, General Manager of Traffic Marketplace Display, explained, “Adometry shares our commitment to transparency, accountability and accuracy, both in terms of the advertising buy and the auditing process.” He added, “Advertisers should never be worried about the safety and integrity of their brand when they work with us. The IAB has made network verification and safety a priority. We have added Adometry to our brandSecureTM suite of safety solutions to proactively ensure our Network is an industry leader in quality assurance.”

“We’re pleased to add Traffic Marketplace to the expanding list of high-quality networks that are offering Adometry’s verification services,” said Jim Ewel, CEO of Adometry. “Together, we can offer the most complete solution in the industry for protecting and improving the effectiveness of online media purchases.”

Effective immediately, Traffic Marketplace is offering its advertisers Adometry’s IntegrityTM and VeracityTM services. Integrity verifies that advertisements are not placed next to inappropriate content, off white-list, or displayed outside of the U.S. Integrity also measures the percentage of ads placed “below the fold.” Veracity provides additional effectiveness metrics including reach, frequency, duration of time an ad is visible, effective cost, and conversion details by website, category and geography.

Utilizing Adometry, Traffic Marketplace reinforces accountability and transparency for advertisers, ultimately strengthening brand integrity and awareness.

For more information, log on to www.trafficmarketplace.com.

About Adometry

Adometry™ is the only solution for online display advertising that provides both ad verification and effectiveness metrics to advertisers and ad agencies. Using a patent pending process, Adometry provides information that not only ensures that placements are compliant with contract and insertion guidelines, but also provides actionable metrics that allow advertisers to make smarter online ad spending decisions.

For more information, log on to www.adometry.com.

Traffic Marketplace

The premier B2A™ (Business-to-Audience) digital marketing company, Traffic Marketplace delivers relevance in online display, registration path, mobile, video and social media advertising by empowering advertisers and agencies to reach, target, and engage their ideal audience. With access to over 140mm unique monthly users, Traffic Marketplace reaches more than 71% of the U.S. Internet population. Through powerful esp targeting technology, Traffic Marketplace can intelligently identify and deliver virtually any target audience. By employing proprietary engagement solutions such as eyengage® rich media and livemarkets™ in-banner chat technology, Traffic Marketplace helps advertisers intrigue, inspire and engage their customers on every online channel. Traffic Marketplace is a company of Epic Media Group, the preeminent privately-held global digital marketing solutions company.

For more information, log on to www.trafficmarketplace.com.

AUSTIN, Texas – Click Forensics, Inc. released advertising audience quality figures for the second quarter 2010 from the industry’s leading independent online advertising data reporting service. Now in its fourth year, the Click Forensics reporting service provides statistically significant data collected from Cost Per Click (CPC) advertising campaigns for both large and small advertisers across all leading search engines as well as comparison shopping engines and social networks. Traffic across more than 300 ad networks is reflected in the data. Key findings for Q2 2010 include:

The overall industry average click fraud rate was 18.6 percent. That’s up from the 17.4 percent reported for Q1 2010 and the 12.7 percent rate reported for Q2 2009.

In Q2 2010, the countries outside North America with significant CPC traffic producing the greatest volume of click fraud were Singapore, Pakistan, Japan, Ukraine and China respectively.

“Over the past several quarters, we’ve seen the overall click fraud rate slowly trending higher,” said Paul Pellman, CEO of Click Forensics. “The main reasons appear to be the continued sophistication of botnets and malware prevalent in the fast-growing search marketing space. We advise online marketers to be watchful of their campaigns as they spend more on search advertising in the coming quarters.”

Since 2006, Click Forensics has published online advertising industry data collected from the first independent third-party Cost Per Click (CPC) and online advertising fraud detection service. The service monitors online media traffic across over 300 ad networks as well as billions of clicks from top search engines, comparison shopping engines, social networks, leading publishers and advertiser web sites – providing the most accurate view of online advertising audience quality.

For more details and to read the full report, visit http://www.clickforensics.com/resources/click-fraud-index.html.

About Click Forensics, Inc.

Click Forensics® is the industry leader in online ad verification and traffic quality improvement for the online advertising community. Click Forensics provides audience verification and traffic quality management solutions for leading online search and display advertisers, agencies, publishers and ad networks. The company also regularly publishes industry data on online advertising audience quality. Click Forensics is headquartered in Austin, Texas, and is privately held with funding from Sierra Ventures, Austin Ventures, Shasta Ventures and Stanford University. More information on Click Forensics and its offerings is available at www.ClickForensics.com.

Existing Investors Austin Ventures, Sierra Ventures and Shasta Ventures Participate in Series C Round

AUSTIN, Texas – Click Forensics, Inc., a leading provider of online advertising and audience verification solutions, announced that it recently closed a $6 million Series C funding round led by Austin Ventures with participation from Sierra Ventures and Shasta Ventures. The funding will help support Click Forensics as it expands development and marketing of new offerings designed to help brand advertisers and agencies verify online audiences and optimize investments for display advertising campaigns.

“The $22+ billion a year market for display advertising is only expected to grow as marketers continue to pour money into automated advertising and audience delivery systems,” said Thomas Ball, partner, Austin Ventures. “As a leader in the space, Click Forensics is an ideal partner to help ensure that the audiences brands buy are indeed what they paid for.”

Since 2006, Click Forensics has provided audience verification solutions for top online marketers, advertisers, agencies, publishers and ad networks in the cost-per-click market. In February of this year, the company announced a beta program for its display ad verification platform, bringing the same level of transparency and accountability to the display ad market. Click Forensics has amassed data on billions of ad impressions and clicks, which it uses to refine and develop sophisticated machine-learning algorithms that filter unwanted audiences and measure the value of audiences that view ads. The company’s SaaS offerings are ideally suited to meet the scalability and performance demands of real-time impression filtering and audience verification.

“The need to verify online audiences has increased greatly as the number of brokers that operate in between the advertiser and the ad impression continues to grow,” said Paul Pellman, CEO of Click Forensics. “The continued support of our investors will allow us to develop new solutions that better protect and improve the performance of online advertising.”

For more information on joining the Click Forensics, visit http://www.clickforensics.com. Follow us on Twitter: @ClickForensics.

About Austin Ventures

Austin Ventures (“AV”) has worked with talented entrepreneurs to build valuable companies for over twenty-five years. With $3.9 billion under management, AV is the most active venture capital and growth equity firm in Texas and one of the most established in the nation. With an investment focus on Internet and information services, software, new media, business services and supply chain, and financial services, AV invests at all stages of company development, from $100,000 in “planned experiments” in early-stage ideas to $100+ million investments in expansion rounds, minority recapitalizations, and buyouts of lower middle market growth companies. AV’s strategy is to partner with talented executives and entrepreneurs through its CEO-in-Residence and Entrepreneur-in-Residence programs. Visit austinventures.com for more information.

About Sierra Ventures

Sierra Ventures, founded in 1982, is a privately held venture capital firm focused on investments across all areas of the Information Technology sector from semiconductors to enterprise software. Sierra Ventures has managed nine venture capital partnerships and currently has more than $1.5 billion of capital under management. Some of the firm’s investments include 360Commerce (acquired by Oracle), Active Software (acquired by WebMethods), AmeriGroup (AGP), Authentec (AUTH), Centex (acquired by WorldCom), ConvergeNet (acquired by Dell), FatBrain (acquired by Barnes & Noble), Frontbridge (acquired by Microsoft), Healtheon (merged with WebMD), Interact Commerce (acquired by Sage), Intuit (INTU), Micromuse (acquired by IBM), OnAssignment (ASGN), OnLink (acquired by Siebel), Quinta (acquired by Seagate), StrataCom (acquired by Cisco), Sourcefire (FIRE), Sychip (acquired by Murata Manufacturing) and Teradata (acquired by NCR). More information is available at http://www.sierraventures.com.

About Shasta Ventures

Shasta Ventures is an early-stage venture capital firm investing in technology-enabled businesses serving consumers and enterprises. Located in Menlo Park, Calif., Shasta Ventures manages $460 million. Shasta was formed in 2004 by venture capital veterans and invests across consumer and business services, infrastructure and software. For more information on Shasta Ventures, please visit www.shastaventures.com.

About Click Forensics, Inc.

Click Forensics® is the industry leader in online ad verification and traffic quality improvement for the online advertising community. Click Forensics provides audience verification and traffic quality management solutions for leading online search and display advertisers, agencies, publishers and ad networks, including companies such as Progressive Insurance, GenieKnows, Adknowledge, eZanga, Moxy Media, Turn, Traffic Engine, Vegas.com and many others. The company also regularly publishes industry data on online advertising audience quality. Click Forensics is headquartered in Austin, Texas, and is privately held with funding from Sierra Ventures, Austin Ventures, Shasta Ventures and Stanford University. More information on Click Forensics and its offerings is available at www.ClickForensics.com.

YuMe Domain Detection Technology Prevents Unwanted Impressions in Syndicated and Embeddable Video Players; Identifies the Partner Sites Delivering Strong Campaign Performance for Syndication-focused Publishers

Redwood City, CA – YuMe, the leading video advertising technology company, announced that it has added a powerful set of brand security capabilities to its ACE technology platform.

The new brand security capabilities leverage YuMe’s proprietary domain detection technology, which can collect detailed information about the in-page environment of a syndicated or embeddable player when it makes an ad request, even when the player is not associated with a companion banner.  This industry-first capability—made possible by broad publisher adoption of YuMe’s ACE technology—allows YuMe to prevent ads from running in video players that have been embedded on inappropriate websites, and to work with publishers to constantly monitor and improve the list of sites where their syndicated and user-embeddable players are appearing.

“At YuMe, we are committed to developing innovative solutions that let brand marketers advertise in online video as confidently as they advertise on TV,” said Jayant Kadambi, co-founder and president of YuMe.  “We believe that keeping brands secure in the rapidly evolving world of online video requires constant monitoring of new threats, and regular investment in technology to prevent them.  Our new domain detection and proactive ad prevention capabilities are the latest element of our ongoing brand security efforts.”

“The majority of online video publishers—including some of the biggest media companies in the world—have chosen to syndicate their premium online video content and to offer user-embeddable video players, and we want to be able to reach these online video audiences while keeping our customers’ brands safe” said Jonathan Nelson, CEO of Omnicom Digital.  “We are pleased that YuMe has chosen to make an ongoing investment in brand security, combining regular monitoring and research with proactive technology to prevent inappropriate impressions before they happen.”

Domain blacklisting: recognizing and preventing inappropriate impressions

YuMe maintains a constantly growing blacklist of over 1.5 million domains that contain inappropriate content.  When YuMe receives an ad request from a video player, it uses its domain detection capabilities to confirm that the player is not embedded on a blacklisted domain before serving an ad.

Syndication quality scores: working with publishers to protect brands

Using a proprietary algorithm, YuMe assigns a syndication quality score to each YuMe publisher, based on how well ads served into its syndicated players perform for advertisers, and on whether the publisher has ever requested an ad for a player on an inappropriate domain.  YuMe manually reviews reviews every site that a YuMe publisher claims as an authorized syndication partner to ensure that they meet YuMe’s quality standards, and creates a formal list of YuMe-reviewed syndication domains for every publisher.  If a publisher makes an ad request from a new domain that is not on YuMe’s blacklist, that domain is flagged for review by YuMe’s staff.  YuMe closely monitors its publishers’ syndication quality scores, and regularly encourages publishers to offer greater campaign performance to advertisers by removing their players from lower-performing domains.

YuMe Chief Revenue Officer Scot McLernon will discuss YuMe’s new brand security capabilities on Tuesday, June 22nd, 2010 at a roundtable discussion hosted by Andy Plesser from Beet.tv and Peter Kafka from All Things Digital’s “MediaMemo.”  A live video stream of the event will be available at http://www.livestream.com/beet_tv.

For more information on the ACE technology platform and YuMe’s brand security efforts, please visit http://www.yume.com/technology/solutions.php.

About YuMe
YuMe is a video advertising technology company that is making professional video profitable for publishers and effective for advertisers. With hundreds of publishers, millions of unique viewers and more than 1 billion video streams per month, YuMe gives publishers and advertisers unprecedented reach, brand safety, contextual relevance, controlled syndication, and consistent delivery across all digital media platforms–Web, downloads, mobile, and IPTV. YuMe is a privately held company headquartered in Redwood City, CA and backed by Accel Partners, BV Capital, DAG Ventures, Khosla Ventures and Menlo Ventures. For more information, visit www.yume.com, follow @yumevideo on twitter (www.twitter.com/yumevideo), or become a fan of YuMe on Facebook at www.facebook.com/yumevideo.

NEW YORK – AdCloud® Media (www.adcloudmedia.com) announced that it has reached legal settlement, dismissing in full a lawsuit brought against the company by AdKnowledge, Inc.

AdCloud Inc. agreed to avoid business with five advertising clients and five publishing suppliers until Oct 31, 2010. The agreement also permits AdCloud to retain all of its current employees and rehire one former employee and provides mutual releases in full for both parties among other items.

AdCloud was represented in the settlement negotiations by Altman & Company P.C. (www.altmanco.net) of New York.

The AdCloud solution was designed and developed from the ground up for a distributed cloud computing environment, using the latest technology in PHP web caching and optimization along with MYSQL database replication technologies.

A highly intuitive solution, AdCloud has integrated many of the industry’s long-sought-after features, such as “screen-on-the-fly” fraud protection, real-time reporting and account management in its platform. AdCloud’s network currently processes in excess of 200 Million ad queries per day with exceptional response times.

The Cloud Computing Advantage

The AdCloud product resides transparently on cloud computing. This gives the company the ability to isolate traffic in a variety of ways to improve traffic quality for all advertisers, identify traffic sources or auto-scale the capacity of AdCloud’s network in seconds during peak periods. By only deploying computing capacity when needed, AdCloud is able to reduce its infrastructure cost during off peak periods and thereby pass along this cost saving to advertisers and partners.

Interested Advertisers and Publishers can sign-up online at www.adcloudmedia.com

Leaders in Search, Sales Strategy and Product Management Will Accelerate Growth Of Clickable’s Search Advertising Solutions

NEW YORK – Clickable, the platform that makes online advertising Simple, Instant and Profitable™, announced the appointment of five key executives from leading Web and information companies including Google, LexisNexis, NetSuite and Yahoo!. These execs join Clickable to help the company scale its operations amidst rapid expansion of its search advertising technology products and partner platform. These new hires coincide with Clickable’s recent integration of Facebook Ads, creating the first live advertising solution to integrate search and social media.

New Clickable execs:

Maia Benson, Senior Director, Strategic Partnerships, now leads Clickable’s Platform business, which services large partners. Benson joins Clickable with 12 years of management experience in the technology industry. She joined from LexisNexis, where she was a product manager and built the firm’s search marketing business. Benson holds a B.A. in political science from Syracuse University, and an M.B.A. from Cornell University.

Michael Burke, Senior Director, Business Development, now co-leads business development and new Platform partnerships. Burke joins Clickable from Google, where he spent seven years in sales and business development, most recently developing Google’s Local advertising strategy for enterprise customers. Burke holds both a B.A. and M.A. from Stanford University.

Don Craney, Senior Director, Business Management Systems, now leads development and management of Clickable’s business systems. Craney has nearly 20 years of experience in business operations, including six years at NetSuite, where he was director of professional services, supporting the company’s rapid growth from startup through IPO. Craney holds a B.S. in business management from Syracuse University.

Gary Liu, Director, Sales Operations, now leads Clickable’s sales strategy group. Liu joins from Google, where he was a senior operations associate who drove efficiency through business analysis for the company’s Inside Sales group, most recently building a scaled telesales channel for the SMB market. He holds a B.S. in economics from Harvard University.

Ganesh Ram, Director, Product Management, now leads Clickable’s product management team. Ram has 12 years of experience deploying global Web and IT products. He joined from Yahoo!, where he was a senior product manager leading Yahoo! Weather. He holds a B.S. in electronics engineering and a M.S. in physics from Birla Institute of Technology and Science in India, and a certificate in management science from Stanford University.

“Advertising’s shift to digital is creating tremendous complexity, causing marketers to demand solutions that are simple to manage, and deliver clear ROI across ad networks and formats,” said David S. Kidder, Clickable Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer. “The talent of our growing team ensures Clickable will continue to disrupt the online advertising marketplace with simplicity, speed and scale.”

Clickable Products:

Clickable Pro is a simple dashboard that empowers marketers to manage online advertising with transformational return on investment. Clickable Pro activates instantly with an intuitive experience that makes it easy to manage pay-per-click performance across all major advertising networks, like Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and Facebook. Clickable’s ActEngine(TM) delivers critical quantitative and qualitative recommendations to maximize profitability. Clickable Conversion Tracking, bulk keyword editing and elegant reporting enable advertising professionals to achieve their goals in less time.
Clickable Assist is a managed service for marketers and agencies that delivers agile assistance to maximize advertising success. It is a simple, affordable solution for launching and re-launching online pay-per-click advertising campaigns, ongoing advice or full-service management. Clickable Assist offers tiers of expert help to match marketers’ needs.
Clickable Platform is a white-label solution that empowers partners to rapidly deploy online advertising to thousands of local customers.

About Clickable

Clickable is a platform that makes online advertising Simple, Instant and Profitable™. It empowers beginners through professionals to maximize their advertising investment. Clickable makes you more efficient, effective, and confident. That’s why customers often say: “Clickable is like having a trusted advisor by your side ensuring success.” To learn more, visit www.Clickable.com.

Quarterly report reveals increased spending across verticals, suggesting economic improvement

CHICAGO – AdGooroo (www.adgooroo.com), a leading provider of online marketing competitive intelligence and keyword tools, released its latest quarterly Search Engine Advertiser Update. The report’s findings demonstrate a 12 percent increase in Yahoo!’s first-page advertisers and a corresponding increase in its total share of advertisers.

“In February and March, Yahoo! had a nearly 28 percent share of total search advertisers, marking a long-time high,” said AdGooroo Founder and CEO Rich Stokes. “AdGooroo’s data suggests that a great deal of Yahoo!’s growth may be coming from outside the United States, and its international ad coverage reached a high of 4.7 ads per keyword in February, which is the most ads Yahoo! has shown since July 2007.”

In the report, Stokes argues that significant spending increases in certain verticals may be early signs of overall economic improvement. Computer hardware and mobile carriers in particular showed atypical gains in search spending. However, home loans and online education continue to experience spending declines.

The five-page report contains charts, data and analysis on the performance of Google, Yahoo! and Bing during Q1 2010 and once again contains the top 25 U.S. advertisers by search engine and search advertising spending by vertical.

Those interested in learning more can view and download a complimentary copy of the report, “Search Engine Advertising Update – Q1 2010” at http://succeed.adgooroo.com/Q1_2010_Search_Advertising_Report.html.

About AdGooroo

AdGooroo provides online marketers and agencies actionable, on demand competitive intelligence tools that proactively monitor an industry’s advertising landscape to help them build a long-term competitive advantage. Based in Chicago, AdGooroo provides competitive intelligence to Internet marketers through its suite of products, including SEM Insight, Display Insight, Trademark Insight and Link Insight. AdGooroo tools leverage access and automation to provide advertisers with lists of competitors’ top keywords, ad copy, campaign statistics and more. Top agencies and brand advertisers leverage AdGooroo competitive intelligence tools. For more information, visit AdGooroo.com.

Study of Ad Campaigns on Top Social Networks Found Click Fraud Rate of 11.5 Percent in Q1 2010; Overall Industry Click Fraud Rate Rises to 17.4 Percent

AUSTIN, Texas – Click Forensics®, Inc. released advertising audience quality figures for the first quarter 2010 from the industry’s leading independent online advertising and click fraud data reporting service. Now in its fourth year, the Click Forensics reporting service provides statistically significant data collected from Cost Per Click (CPC) advertising campaigns for both large and small advertisers across all leading search engines as well as comparison shopping engines and social networks. Traffic across more than 300 ad networks is reflected in the data. Key findings for Q1 2010 include:

- A study of hundreds of online campaigns from a cross-section of advertisers and third-party ad networks showed traffic from leading social networking sites, including MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, to have an average overall click fraud rate of 11.5 percent, significantly lower than the industry average.

- The overall industry average click fraud rate was 17.4 percent. That’s up from 15.3 percent for Q4 2009 and the 13.8 percent rate reported for Q1 2009.

- In Q1 2010, the countries outside North America with significant CPC traffic producing the greatest volume of click fraud were the Philippines, Ukraine and China, respectively.

“While a handful of suspected click fraud schemes on social networking sites have been alleged by individual advertisers, it’s widely assumed that these sites are less vulnerable to click fraud schemes,” said Paul Pellman, CEO of Click Forensics. “The results of our new study corroborate this by tracking a lower overall click fraud rate on social networks than we’ve ever tracked on traditional PPC venues. Conversely, the overall industry rate seems to be creeping higher, so we recommend marketers continue to be watchful of their campaigns.”

Since 2006, Click Forensics has published online advertising industry data collected from the first independent third-party Cost Per Click (CPC) and online advertising fraud detection service. The service monitors online media traffic across over 300 ad networks as well as billions of clicks from top search engines, comparison shopping engines, social networks, leading publishers and advertiser web sites – providing the most accurate view of online advertising audience quality.

For more details and to read the full report “Click Fraud Rate Q1 2010,” visit http://www.clickforensics.com/resources/click-fraud-index.html.

About Click Forensics, Inc.

Click Forensics® is the industry leader in audience verification and traffic quality improvement for the online advertising community. Click Forensics provides audience verification and traffic quality management solutions for leading online advertisers, publishers and ad networks, including companies such as Progressive Insurance, GenieKnows, Adknowledge, eZanga, Moxy Media, Turn, Traffic Engine, Vegas.com and many others. The company also regularly publishes industry data on online advertising audience quality. Click Forensics is headquartered in Austin, Texas, and is privately held with funding from Sierra Ventures, Austin Ventures, Shasta Ventures and Stanford University. More information on Click Forensics and its offerings is available at http://www.ClickForensics.com.

Click Forensics and Click Fraud Index are registered trademarks of Click Forensics, Inc. All other company and product names mentioned are used only for identification and may be trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies.

PoachMark’s AdSense Monitoring Gives Marketers an Unprecedented Ability to Monitor Affiliate Use of Their Trademarks in the Largest Contextual Advertising Network

SEATTLE – BrandVerity (www.brandverity.com) announced that PoachMark, BrandVerity’s pay-per-click (PPC) ad monitoring service, now monitors PPC ads run on the AdSense network.

PoachMark’s monitoring agents now monitor a number of high-traffic websites that display AdSense ads. Advertisements that meet criteria specified by PoachMark customers are flagged, filtered and alerted on. While AdSense monitoring has been available to select PoachMark subscribers for several months, it is now available to new accounts.

“As our clients have driven unauthorized affiliates out of the major search engines, we have seen the same affiliates resurface purchasing AdSense ads instead,” said David Naffziger, BrandVerity CEO. “This addition to PoachMark greatly enhances brand owners’ ability to monitor and manage unauthorized affiliate activity.”

AdSense monitoring is included with paid PoachMark subscriptions at no additional cost. For more information about BrandVerity and a free trial of the PoachMark service, go to www.brandverity.com.

BrandVerity provides technology solutions to brand owners to combat trademark abuse and advertising fraud. The company’s first product, PoachMark, provides unparalled insight into the search activity of affiliate marketers, giving brand owners a tool to ensure compliance with their search policies and recover fraudulent commissions. BrandVerity was founded in 2008 and is based in Seattle, Washington. For more information, visit www.brandverity.com.

Audience Filtering Technology Works with Existing Brand Safety Offerings; Protects Against Impression Inflation and Fraud

AUSTIN, Texas – Click Forensics®, Inc., a leading provider of online advertising verification solutions, opened the beta testing program for a new platform that will enable online display advertisers to make audience impression filtering and ad serving decisions in real-time. The technology, designed to complement existing brand safety solutions, also features analytics to measure the effectiveness of display ad campaigns at reaching their desired audiences. Online advertisers, agencies and ad networks using the platform will benefit by reducing ad spend wasted on unwanted and ineffective impressions, which will improve overall campaign ROI. Organizations interested in participating in the beta program, can visit www.clickforensics.com/display.

The first new features will be commercially available in Q1 2010, with new functionality added regularly. The new Click Forensics platform is designed to bring a new level of transparency to the display advertising market, similar to what the company’s search ad verification platform has delivered in the search marketing space for years. This includes tracking and blocking impression inflation, including malware schemes used to inflate click through rates (CTRs) on display ads.

“As companies look to expand investments in display advertising through online networks and exchanges, they need ways to ensure they’re reaching their intended audiences for media buys,” said Paul Pellman, CEO of Click Forensics. “It also means they need to watch for ad impression inflation and outright fraud, which can cost them more money than necessary. Our new platform helps advertisers and ad providers do just that by taking what we’ve learned in search and applying it to display.”

The Click Forensics display ad verification platform is designed to solve problems online advertisers face when purchasing inventory through any of the newly available channels, such as ad exchanges, demand side platforms (DSPs) and blind ad networks. This includes helping marketers to verify the delivery of purchased impressions, such as how many impressions they received, to whom they were delivered, and whether they were viewed by a human for an appreciable time period. By using the Click Forensics platform, advertisers and agencies will be able to pre-filter individual unwanted impressions in real-time and verify that campaign objectives are met by delivering better targeted impressions.

“We’re excited to work with Click Forensics on the development of this new offering to help us deliver more precise targeting and results for client ad campaigns,” said Matt Greitzer, vice president of search marketing and head of ATOM Systems at Razorfish. “The company’s expertise and experience vetting ad quality across billions of search advertising clicks is a huge advantage in handling the demands of display advertising verification.”

As the leader in search advertising audience verification, Click Forensics is uniquely positioned to bring additional transparency to the display advertising community. Over the past four years the company has amassed data on billions of clicks and ad impressions, which it uses to develop sophisticated machine-learning algorithms that discover click fraud, malware sources and botnets; filter unwanted audiences; and measure the value of audiences that view ads. With the ability to collect and manage massive amounts of data and process billions of impressions per day, the new Click Forensics platform for display advertising is designed to meet the scalability and performance demands of real-time impression filtering and verification.

For more information on joining the Click Forensics, visit www.clickforensics.com. Follow us on Twitter: @ClickForensics.

About Click Forensics, Inc.

Click Forensics® is the industry leader in online ad verification and traffic quality improvement for the online advertising community. Click Forensics provides audience verification and traffic quality management solutions for leading online search and display advertisers, agencies, publishers and ad networks, including companies such as Progressive Insurance, GenieKnows, Adknowledge, eZanga, Moxy Media, Turn, Traffic Engine, Vegas.com and many others. The company also regularly publishes industry data on online advertising audience quality. Click Forensics is headquartered in Austin, Texas, and is privately held with funding from Sierra Ventures, Austin Ventures, Shasta Ventures and Stanford University. More information on Click Forensics and its offerings is available at www.ClickForensics.com.

WESTLAKE VILLAGE, Calif. – ValueClick Media and Commission Junction, divisions of global online marketing leader ValueClick, Inc. (Nasdaq: VCLK), have renewed agreements with Cyveillance, reaffirming their position among the safest networks for advertisers concerned about the security of their brands online.

Cyveillance provides both ValueClick Media and Commission Junction with real-time content monitoring to deliver early warning of potential violations of the networks’ publisher terms and conditions. In addition to monitoring thousands of URLs within both networks for objectionable content, Cyveillance monitors millions of domains across the Internet for instances of ad tags appearing on unapproved sites. Furthermore, the monitoring and collecting of data is fully automated, enabling ValueClick Media and Commission Junction to increase their proactive approach in protecting advertisers.

“Cyveillance is a strong complement to our internal network monitoring systems, providing another layer of security and giving advertisers further assurance of our commitment to protect their brands online,” said Tom Vadnais, chief executive officer of ValueClick, Inc.

Proprietary network monitoring technologies used by ValueClick Media and Commission Junction include real-time domain verification, fraud detection, traffic monitoring and site scoring systems. In addition, both networks maintain dedicated network quality teams and have some of the most stringent publisher acceptance criteria in the online advertising industry.

“We understand the critical importance ValueClick places on network quality and we are proud to be the technology provider they trust to monitor their network for potential content violations,” said Panos Anastassiadis, chief operating officer of Cyveillance. “Our proactive monitoring solutions go beyond simple flagging of violations and enable corrective action in real-time, continuously protecting the brands of advertisers.”

About Cyveillance

Cyveillance, a world leader in cyber intelligence, provides an intelligence-led approach to security. Through continuous, comprehensive Internet monitoring and sophisticated intelligence analysis, Cyveillance proactively identifies and eliminates threats to information, infrastructure, individuals and their interactions, enabling its customers to preserve their reputation, revenues, and customer trust. Cyveillance serves the Global 2000 and OEM Data Partners – protecting the majority of the Fortune 50, regional financial institutions nationwide, and more than 100 million global consumers through its partnerships with security and service providers that include Blue Coat, AOL and Microsoft. Cyveillance is a wholly owned subsidiary of QinetiQ North America. For more information, please visit www.cyveillance.com or http://www.qinetiq-na.com.

About ValueClick, Inc.

ValueClick, Inc. (Nasdaq: VCLK) is one of the world’s largest online marketing services companies, offering comprehensive and scalable solutions to deliver cost-effective customer acquisition for advertisers and robust revenue streams for publishers. ValueClick’s performance-based solutions allow customers to reach their potential through multiple online marketing channels, including affiliate and search marketing, display advertising, lead generation, ad serving and e-mail technology, and comparison shopping. ValueClick brands include Commission Junction, ValueClick Media, Mediaplex, PriceRunner and Smarter.com. For more information, visit http://www.valueclick.com.

Proliferation of Botnets and Exploitation of Holiday Spend Caused Attempted Click Fraud Rate to Peak at 26% in Q4 2009

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. – Anchor Intelligence, the leading provider of traffic quality solutions, released the Anchor Intelligence Traffic Quality Report: 2009 Year In Review. The Anchor Intelligence network saw the average attempted click fraud rate jump from 18.6% in Q3 to 25.7% in Q4 – an increase of almost 40%; this is the highest attempted click fraud rate recorded by Anchor in all of 2009.

The spike in the attempted click fraud rate in Q4 was due to greater activity by click fraudsters looking to take advantage of the surge in holiday ad spend online. The proliferation of botnets, which are commonly used for automating traffic and coordinating click fraud ring activity, spiked late in the quarter. Furthermore, most new customers had much higher attempted click fraud rates than what is typically observed, due to the considerable presence of traffic from large-scale click fraud rings.

Report Highlights

In Q4 2009, the attempted click fraud rate peaked at 25.7%.
The 5 countries with the highest attempted click fraud rates in 2009 were Vietnam, U.S., Egypt, Canada, and Australia. In particular, the U.S. and Canada accounted for the vast majority of traffic volume, making these two countries the largest sources of attempted click fraud by volume.
Anchor saved advertisers approximately $35 million in 2009 by identifying click fraud in real time, before it could impact advertiser spend.
Anchor predicts that click fraud attempts will increase in 2010 as cybercriminals increasingly exploit the growth and adoption of social networks such as Facebook and tools such as Twitter.
“As botnets become more flexible and resilient, click fraud will be increasingly difficult to identify without a collaborative and systematic, network-based approach,” said Ken Miller, CEO of Anchor Intelligence. “By releasing this report, we hope to provide a barometer by which the industry can assess the level of threats to online advertising while also conveying the importance of advertising with ad networks and search engines that partner with third-parties to certify their traffic quality.”

ClearMark, Anchor’s real-time traffic scoring system, classifies traffic according to quality, enabling customers to differentiate invalid traffic from valid traffic, before it can impact advertiser spend. Additionally, ClearMark distinguishes between attempted click fraud – clicks or impressions generated with malicious intent – and other invalid traffic, such as double clicks, traffic from self-identified robots, and internal clicks.

Download the report here: http://www.anchorintelligence.com/ai/resources/category/traffic_quality_report/

Click to Tweet: @AnchorIntel reports one out of every four ad clicks is an attempt at click fraud, http://bit.ly/8vRyhx

About Anchor Intelligence:

Anchor Intelligence Inc., headquartered in Mountain View, CA, is the traffic quality solutions provider of choice among ad networks, search engines, and advertisers from across the globe. Using Anchor Intelligence’s ClearMark, the industry’s first and only real-time traffic scoring system, industry players obtain the necessary intelligence to fight click and impression fraud, efficiently manage traffic sources, and capitalize on high quality clicks while maximizing advertiser ROI. For more information, visit: www.anchorintelligence.com. Follow us on Twitter: twitter.com/AnchorIntel.

Rate Lowest in Three Years for Busy Holiday Shopping Season

AUSTIN, Texas – Click Forensics, Inc. released advertising audience quality figures for the fourth quarter 2009 from the industry’s leading independent online advertising and click fraud data reporting service. Now in its fourth year, the Click Forensics reporting service provides statistically significant data collected from Cost Per Click (CPC) advertising campaigns for both large and small advertisers across all leading search engines as well as comparison shopping engines and social networks. Traffic across more than 300 ad networks is reflected in the data. Key findings for Q4 2009 include:

The overall industry average click fraud rate was 15.3 percent. That’s up from 14.1 percent for Q3 2009 and down from the record 17.1 percent rate reported for Q4 2008.
In Q4 2009, the countries outside North America with significant CPC traffic producing the greatest volume of click fraud were the Ukraine, Japan, and the Czech Republic, respectively.
“While the overall industry click fraud rate rose slightly in the fourth quarter, it was the lowest we’ve seen for this time of the year,” said Paul Pellman, CEO of Click Forensics. “This seems to indicate that ad networks, publishers and the search engines themselves are doing a better job catching the click fraud spikes that have become common during the busy search marketing holiday season.”

Since 2006, Click Forensics has published online advertising industry data collected from the first independent third-party Cost Per Click (CPC) and Internet advertising fraud detection service. The service monitors online media traffic across over 300 ad networks as well as billions of clicks from top search engines, comparison shopping engines, social networks, leading publishers and advertiser web sites – providing the most accurate view of online advertising audience quality to date.

For more information on the recent Click Forensics data, visit http://www.clickforensics.com/resources/click-fraud-index.html.

About Click Forensics, Inc.

Click Forensics® is the industry leader in audience verification and traffic quality improvement for the online advertising community. Click Forensics provides audience verification and traffic quality management solutions for leading online advertisers, publishers and ad networks, including companies such as Progressive Insurance, GenieKnows, Adknowledge, eZanga, Moxy Media, Turn, Traffic Engine, Vegas.com and many others. The company also regularly publishes industry data on online advertising audience quality. Click Forensics is headquartered in Austin, Texas, and is privately held with funding from Sierra Ventures, Austin Ventures, Shasta Ventures and Stanford University. More information on Click Forensics and its offerings is available at www.ClickForensics.com.

Partners with ClickFacts to Protect Web Publishers and Demand Partners from Malvertising Attacks

LOS ANGELES – the Rubicon Project, the Internet advertising infrastructure company, is coming to the aid of premium Web publishers and their sales channel partners in their fight against malvertising, a top online security threat in 2010. Through the integration of automated ad tag monitoring technology from ClickFacts, an automated Risk Discovery solution, Rubicon Security, a new offering within the company’s REVV for publishers™ platform, identifies offending ad tags and their source, stopping attacks before they reach consumers.

Malicious advertising, or “malvertising,” also referred to as “malware,” is a form of unwanted or malicious software that is typically distributed through advertising tags served through an unsuspecting publisher’s website. Tracking and stopping malvertising has been a nearly impossible process with many publishers still unable to detect and stop malicious ads before the first consumer complaint comes in, by which time the brand’s reputation has already been damaged.

ClickFacts Ad Network and Publisher Management Suite enables Rubicon Security to automatically scan all ad tags, advertising creatives and publisher pages for content and malware before delivering advertisements, allowing publishers to manage the high volume of ad tags on any given page while dramatically reducing the potential of malicious attacks. Additionally, Rubicon Security continues to monitor the ad tags once they are served to ensure malware doesn’t attack the campaign.

“Malware, and especially malvertising attacks, are becoming ever more pervasive as unscrupulous hackers are always finding creative ways to manipulate advertising for their own malicious benefit, and to the detriment of everyone else. It’s extremely important for publishers, ad exchanges, agencies and their advertisers to seek solutions for safeguarding their brands and consumers,” said Michael Caruso, CEO of ClickFacts. “the Rubicon Project has been a leader in ad quality and brand protection for the industry, and we’re excited to help them maintain this high standard, while alleviating concern and driving revenue for their customers and partners.”

Most ad serving technology was built twelve years ago, and isn’t equipped to deal with today’s huge volume of different buyers and sellers, creating vulnerabilities in the system. Agencies and advertisers have their own way to tag ads and publishers don’t have control, as there are thousands of different ad tags running on a publisher’s site at any given time. These disparate systems have had no universal quality control because nothing is tied together, driving the need for automation and technology innovation to eradicate the vulnerabilities of this process.

For demand partners, Rubicon Security quickly identifies offending ads and fights hackers’ tactics to reduce the potential of delivering malware or inappropriate content to consumers. This protects ad networks, exchanges and rep firms’ revenue and their reputation with premium publishers.

“Publishers have told us that malvertising is one of the biggest threats to their business, and antiquated ad infrastructure technology is largely at fault. Malware can affect millions of people within hours and that can be damaging for businesses and brands,” said Craig Roah, COO and Founder of the Rubicon Project. “With ClickFacts’ technology and our REVV platform, we are the first to provide this level of security and protection against malvertising – streamlining the process and helping our customers and demand partners protect their brands.”

To read more about the Rubicon Project’s complete Brand Guard product suite, visit: http://rubiconproject.com/REVV/revv-product-suite/brand-guard/

About the Rubicon Project

Headquartered in Los Angeles, the Rubicon Project launched in 2007 with a mission to automate the $65 billion global online advertising industry. The company’s Yield Management Optimization platform, REVV for Publishers™, is engineered to accelerate revenue for premium Web publishers. Backed by $42 million in funding from Clearstone Venture Partners, Mayfield Fund, IDG Ventures and GE/NBC Universal’s Peacock Equity Fund, the Rubicon Project serves premium publishers like NBC Universal, Gannett and CareerBuilder; optimizing more than 45 billion ads each month and reaching 500 million unique Internet users. Ranked second in overall Internet reach by Quantcast, the Rubicon Project also helps ad sales channels around the world gain access to precise audience-segmented inventory, at broad scale.

About ClickFacts

ClickFacts is the industry-leading provider of risk discovery tools for online advertising networks, publishers and advertisers, making the Internet a safer place for businesses and consumers to interact through digital advertising without falling victim to cyber crime. ClickFacts is privately held and was founded in 2005. ClickFacts is based out of San Francisco, CA.

Online Audience Verification Firm Helps Ensure Higher Quality Advertising Traffic for eBay Merchants

AUSTIN, Texas – Click Forensics, Inc., the industry leader in audience verification and traffic quality improvement for the online advertising community, announced that it is working with eBay, the world’s largest online marketplace, to help protect eBay advertisers from fraudulent traffic and to improve conversion rates for merchants using eBay’s AdCommerce advertising platform. By working together to filter out low-quality and invalid traffic, Click Forensics will help AdCommerce deliver higher quality audiences to AdCommerce advertisers, driving increased conversions and greater profits.

“It is crucial that we deliver the highest quality traffic to our advertising partners, and working with Click Forensics will help ensure that we are doing just that”

“It is crucial that we deliver the highest quality traffic to our advertising partners, and working with Click Forensics will help ensure that we are doing just that,” said Alexis Van De Wyer, director of advertising at eBay Inc. “Click Forensics has its finger on the pulse of the latest in audience verification – working together we will ensure that we are maximizing results for eBay’s advertising partners.”

Multiple eBay business units will benefit from the relationship, including the eBay Partner Network (ePN) and the eBay AdCommerce unit. AdCommerce is an advertising tool for eBay merchants that helps increase their visibility among eBay buyers by displaying cost-per-click ads to eBay visitors based on keywords or categories. The agreement between the two companies provides for data sharing, technology licensing and professional services consulting.

“eBay is committed to delivering the highest quality traffic to its advertiser merchants,” said Paul Pellman, CEO of Click Forensics, Inc. “We look forward to collaborating closely with eBay to continually improve and enhance both our platforms for the benefit of online advertisers.”

The Click Forensics audience verification platform allows ad networks, advertisers, agencies and publishers to protect themselves against bad online traffic sources, while targeting and delivering traffic sources that are more likely to convert into sales. The Click Forensics platform measures and analyzes each individual ad visitor, or click, to determine its value and propensity to convert. The platform is also used to block certain types of online traffic that deliver poor ROI, such as botnets and known fraud perpetrators. The power of the Click Forensics platform is derived from monitoring online media traffic across over 300 ad networks as well as billions of clicks from top search engines, content aggregators, leading publishers and advertiser web sites – providing the most complete and holistic view of search and online advertising traffic quality.

For more information on Click Forensics and its offerings, visit www.clickforensics.com. Follow us on Twitter: @ClickForensics.

About Click Forensics, Inc.

Click Forensics® is the industry leader in audience verification and traffic quality improvement for the online advertising community. Click Forensics provides audience verification and traffic quality management solutions for leading online advertisers, publishers and ad networks, including companies such as eBay, Yahoo!, Progressive Insurance, eZanga, Nextag, Moxy Media, Turn, Traffic Engine, Vegas.com and many others. The company also regularly publishes industry data on online advertising audience quality. Click Forensics is headquartered in Austin, Texas, and is privately held with funding from Sierra Ventures, Austin Ventures, Shasta Ventures and Stanford University. More information on Click Forensics and its offerings is available at www.ClickForensics.com.

New Capabilities Help Ad Networks Adjust to Traffic Scoring Changes; Predict Sources Likely to Receive Low YTQ Scores
Search Engine Strategies Chicago 2009

CHICAGO – Ad networks and publishers looking to navigate the recent changes made to the Yahoo! Total Quality (TQ) scoring system now have an enhanced tool to help. At SES Chicago, Click Forensics released an upgraded version of its Yahoo! TQ Forecast feature, which allows ad networks and publishers to more accurately predict the scores their traffic sources will receive before they’re sent on to Yahoo!. The enhancements were added in response to customer requests for help in understanding recent changes the search provider made to the algorithms it uses to measure traffic quality from publisher and ad network partners.

“The Yahoo! TQ scoring system is designed to deliver better results for advertisers. But it also impacts how ad networks and publishers manage their traffic,” said Paul Pellman, CEO of Click Forensics. “The vast amount of traffic we see being delivered to Yahoo!, in addition to the resulting TQ scores, gives us unique insight into the markers of traffic quality. This experience is reflected in our expanded Yahoo! TQ Forecast feature, which is designed to ensure that the traffic our clients send to Yahoo! continues to translate into profits for them and their partners.”

The recent enhancements made to the Yahoo! TQ Score Forecast feature are available in the latest version of the Click Forensics audience verification platform. Key capabilities include:

* YTQ Forecast Report – provides a summary of the likely Yahoo TQ scores particular traffic sources will receive when they’re sent to Yahoo!;
* Dynamic Adjustments – continuously monitors and adjusts to changes in the YTQ score rankings so that clients can appropriately tune and filter traffic sources;
* Preemptive Traffic Source Blocking – enables publishers and ad networks to quickly identify and block certain online advertising traffic sources that are likely to deliver low Yahoo! TQ scores; and
* Enhanced Botnet Detection – delivers better detection of non-human clicks, both malicious and benign, while serving as an early warning system for advanced sources of fraud.

The Click Forensics audience verification platform allows ad networks, advertisers, agencies and publishers to protect themselves against bad online traffic sources, while targeting and delivering traffic sources that are more likely to convert into sales. The Click Forensics platform measures and analyzes each individual ad visitor, or click, to determine its value and propensity to convert. The platform is also used to block certain types of online traffic that deliver poor ROI, such as botnets and known fraud perpetrators. The power of the Click Forensics platform is derived from monitoring online media traffic across over 300 ad networks as well as billions of clicks from top search engines, content aggregators, leading publishers and advertiser web sites – providing the most complete and holistic view of search and online advertising traffic quality.

For more information on Click Forensics, visit www.clickforensics.com. Follow us on Twitter: @ClickForensics.

About Click Forensics, Inc.

Click Forensics is the industry leader in audience verification and traffic quality improvement for the online advertising community. Click Forensics provides audience verification and traffic quality management solutions for leading online advertisers, publishers and ad networks, including companies such as GenieKnows, Progressive Insurance, Nextag, Moxy Media, Turn, Traffic Engine, Vegas.com and many others. The company also regularly publishes industry data on online advertising audience quality. Click Forensics is headquartered in Austin, Texas, and is privately held with funding from Sierra Ventures, Austin Ventures, Shasta Ventures and Stanford University. More information on Click Forensics and its offerings is available at www.ClickForensics.com.

Click Forensics and Click Fraud Index are registered trademarks of Click Forensics, Inc. All other company and product names mentioned are used only for identification and may be trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies.

Traffic Quality Benefits Drop Directly to the Bottom Line

AUSTIN, Texas – Click Forensics, Inc., the industry leader in audience verification and traffic quality improvement for the online advertising community, announced that local search giant GenieKnowsMedia.com as well as several other ad networks and publishers have selected the Click Forensics platform to improve the performance of campaigns for advertiser clients. In addition to GenieKnowsMedia.com, Adfirmative, Avalanche Search Media, Juggle, Moxy Media, Traffic Engine, and TruSearch are the latest companies to standardize on the Click Forensics platform for online traffic quality improvement and audience verification.

“After carefully evaluating the available solutions in the market, we found the Click Forensics platform to be the most effective, scalable and accurate for verifying and ensuring the quality of traffic we deliver to online advertisers,” said John Manning, senior vice president of GenieKnowsMedia.com. “We look forward to working closely with Click Forensics to improve the performance and bottom line results of our advertisers’ campaigns.”

The Click Forensics online audience verification and traffic quality management platform allows ad networks, advertisers, agencies and publishers to protect themselves against bad online traffic sources, while targeting and delivering traffic sources that are more likely to convert into sales. The Click Forensics platform measures and analyzes each individual ad visitor to determine its value and likely conversion rate. The platform can also be tuned to block certain types of online traffic that deliver poor ROI.

“The market opportunities are abundant for ad networks that consistently deliver high quality audiences,” said Julio Vaca, VP of Operations at Avalanche Search Media. “In just a short period of time, Click Forensics has helped us to improve our traffic quality by 10-20 percent. It’s a testament to the sophisticated technology and data that Click Forensics provides to its ad network partners. It more than pays for itself.”

The power of the Click Forensics online audience verification and traffic quality management platform is derived from monitoring online media traffic across over 300 ad networks as well as billions of clicks from top search engines, content aggregators, leading publishers and advertiser web sites – providing the most complete and holistic view of search and online advertising traffic quality. Combining more than three years of online advertising data and patent-pending heuristics to measure and score traffic quality in real-time, the best and worst sources are flagged so advertisers, publishers, content aggregators and ad networks can select only the kind of traffic they want in order to improve the overall performance of online campaigns.

“We’re honored to help GenieKnowsMedia.com and our other new customers verify the quality of their online audiences so they can deliver better traffic to advertiser clients and trading partners,” said Paul Pellman, CEO of Click Forensics, Inc. “Each day more ad networks, agencies and publishers like them recognize the power and results that the Click Forensics platform can offer.”

For more information on Click Forensics and its offerings, visit www.clickforensics.com. Follow us on Twitter: @ClickForensics.

About GenieKnows

GenieKnowsMedia.com (a division of IT Interactive Services Inc.) connects search technology, community and content by developing niche-specific portals tailored for distinct searching communities, delivering a focused, useful and rewarding search experience. GenieKnowsMedia.com also empowers a broad distribution network for advertisers, helping businesses connect with consumers and grow their bottom line by conveying meaningful, revenue-generating search results.

About Click Forensics, Inc.

Click Forensics is the industry leader in audience verification and traffic quality improvement for the online advertising community. Click Forensics provides audience verification and traffic quality management solutions for leading online advertisers, publishers and ad networks, including companies such as Yahoo!, Progressive Insurance, GenieKnowsMedia.com, Experian, Nextag, Moxy Media, Turn, Traffic Engine, Vegas.com and many others. The company also publishes data on online advertising audience quality, including the Click Fraud Index®, the top independent source of industry click fraud data. Click Forensics is headquartered in Austin, Texas, and is privately held with funding from Sierra Ventures, Austin Ventures, Shasta Ventures and Stanford University. More information on Click Forensics and its offerings is available at www.ClickForensics.com.

Search Engine Strategies Chicago 2009

CHICAGO – Today at the Search Engine Strategies (SES) Chicago conference, experts from Clix Marketing, Click Forensics, Pepperjam and Page Zero Media will participate in a panel discussion titled: “Ads in a Quality Score World.” Panelists will explore the impact that the quality of online advertising campaigns has on overall ROI and performance. This includes a detailed overview of various ad quality factors as well as tips on increasing the perceived relevancy of campaigns.

Search Engine Strategies (SES) is the leading international conference series for webmasters, digital agencies, online marketers and corporate decision makers. Over the years SES has guided search marketers of all skill levels through the fast changing and complex world of search.

Panel Participants:

Moderator: David Szetela, CEO, Clix Marketing
Steve O’Brien, Vice President of Marketing & Sales, Click Forensics
Kristopher Jones, President & CEO, Pepperjam
Andrew Goodman, SES Advisory Board & Principal, Page Zero Media
When:

Wednesday, December 9, 2009, 12:45-2:00pm

Where:

Hilton Chicago
720 S. Michigan Ave
Chicago, IL 60605

About Click Forensics, Inc.

Click Forensics is the industry leader in audience verification and traffic quality improvement for the online advertising community. Click Forensics provides audience verification and traffic quality management solutions for leading online advertisers, publishers and ad networks, including companies such as Yahoo!, Progressive Insurance, GenieKnowsMedia.com, Experian, Nextag, Moxy Media, Turn, Traffic Engine, Vegas.com and many others. The company also publishes data on online advertising audience quality, including the Click Fraud Index®, the top independent source of industry click fraud data. Click Forensics is headquartered in Austin, Texas, and is privately held with funding from Sierra Ventures, Austin Ventures, Shasta Ventures and Stanford University. More information on Click Forensics and its offerings is available at www.ClickForensics.com.

Real Life Lessons in Maximizing Advertising ROI Online

SOMERVILLE, N.J. – Adblade, the web’s largest premium only advertising platform, serving ads on over 1000 premium portals, released a list of 5 common but deadly mistakes committed by online advertisers. The results were compiled over the last 12 months by speaking with advertisers and by reviewing hundreds of campaigns placed on the Adblade Premium Publisher Network.

Failure to change or rotate ad creative – All online advertising creative experiences user fatigue over time. Campaigns which run out of steam quickly are those that fail to change or rotate their ad creative. This includes changing images, headlines, descriptions and landing pages. The most sophisticated advertisers are constantly testing and rotating in new creative.

Too ambitious with design or creative – Engagement and click through rates for standard IAB Units continue to fall, yet many advertisers fail to think critically about what will generate the most engagement by users, even after time and money is poured into their designs and concepts. You may have a nice logo and a stunningly attractive ad but will your target audience notice and what reason will they have to click?

Using Long Tail Sites and Ad Networks – Ad Networks that serve long tail publishers have a much higher incidence of click and impression fraud resulting in lower ROI for advertisers. Is a $.40 CPM really a bargain when half of the impressions and 95% of clicks are fraudulent? Sticking with premium distribution will not only increase your brand value but will also deliver increased ROI.

Unable to get over the learning curve – Many advertisers have grand plans to scale their business using digital media but are disappointed with their first attempts. It takes patience and time to optimize successful online campaigns, from finding the best creative and placements to optimizing landing pages, user experiences and offers. Advertisers too often give up before they have found their secret formula.

HTML/Browser warnings – Landing pages look different in every browser type. Certain browsers also display warnings based on the HTML of the website. Internet Explorer for example asks users to decide if they would like to see web pages which contain both secure and non-secure information before the page loads. Make sure your landing pages don’t cause warnings which interrupt and inhibit the conversion process. Any warnings or errors will have a dramatic negative effect on campaign performance.

About Adblade

Adblade has quickly become a leader in online display advertising by offering advertisers and publishers unique features and technology which improve the economics of online advertising for everyone. Adblade represents much of the advertising seen on over 1000 premium branded local and national websites. Adblade’s News Bullets have a much higher engagement and click through rate than traditional display advertising. Adblade now reaches over 150 million unique US monthly users making Adblade the largest premium ad platform on the Web. More information at www.adblade.com

NEW YORK – AdCloud Media announced the general availability of its 1st generation advertising solution, an expandable platform that leverages cloud computing technology to maximize the return on investment for both advertisers and publishers.

Designed and developed from the ground up for a distributed cloud computing environment using the latest technology in PHP web caching and optimization along with MYSQL database replication technologies, the highly intuitive AdCloud (www.adcloudmedia.com) solution integrates many of the industry’s long-sought-after features, such as “screen-on-the-fly” fraud protection, real-time reporting and account management.

Click fraud remains at epidemic levels in the industry. Click Forensics® recently released industry pay-per-click (PPC) fraud figures associated with its the Click Fraud Index®, which showed that click fraud rate for the overall industry was still unacceptably high at 12.7 percent.

The “screen-on-the-fly” and click-fraud identification technologies are engaged much earlier in the process, reducing website partner and advertiser costs, overhead, and bandwidth. The “Screening” technology also permits AdCloud to capture and retain unprecedented quantities of data at search time for comparison to valid click data. This provides the company with a continuous feedback loop of fraud detection and traffic quality scores.

According to Chief Executive Officer and co-founder George Nassef, “The screen-on-the-fly technology not only streamlines the entire process, it provides a superior experience for the end user surfing the web over older networks. Only the proper ads are displayed, leading to fewer wasted clicks, lower costs for all, fewer processors, and a much better navigation experience.”

AdCloud’s new product resides transparently on cloud computing sites like Amazon’s Elastic Computing Cloud. This gives the company the ability to isolate traffic in a variety of ways to improve traffic quality for all advertisers, identify traffic sources or auto-scale the capacity of AdCloud’s network in seconds during peak periods. By only deploying computing capacity when needed, AdCloud is able to reduce its infrastructure cost during off peak periods and thereby pass a long this cost saving to advertisers and partner.

“Being on the cloud gives us unprecedented flexibility in deploying new features and enhancement in record time,” says CTO and co-founder Gerald Owens. “This flexibility keeps our development and operations cost extremely low, passing the savings on to our customers. Once a new feature is developed the systems and infrastructure are introduced to a cloud server and is replicated in real-time as customer demand increases.”

For more information, visit www.adcloudmedia.com.

Undertone Networks Identifies Best Practices for Safeguarding Against Click and Impression Fraud

NEW YORK – In the world of online advertising, the “click” has been causing quite the commotion. Many industry organizations and even business publications like The Wall Street Journal have reported on click fraud as an increasing problem in online advertising. As a result, Undertone Networks has identified three key best practices for agencies and advertisers to ensure the safety of online ads and the brands represented.

Recently, click fraud has impacted many brands and publishers, including The New York Times and even Microsoft. Companies spend large amounts of money on online advertising and click fraud can cost brands not just ad dollars, but also credibility. In October, ClickForensics reported the overall industry average click fraud rate for Q3 2009 was 14.1 percent, up from 12.7 percent for Q2 2009. As advertisers, publishers and ad networks are getting smarter, so are the attackers. A recently uncovered click fraud ring run out of China involved 200,000 IP addresses and more than $3 million worth of fraudulent clicks.

“While we’re moving away from the click as the de facto measurement tool for online campaigns, it does persist for many of our clients, as do more complex transactional metrics. The integrity of any measure we put forth as a campaign goal is critical to our clients,” said Erin Matts, chief digital officer, OMD US. “Optimizing online ad campaigns based on clicks – either fully or in part – is common, but buyers and advertisers must remember that there are risks. It comes down to the networks and partners advertisers work with, so companies should choose wisely.”

As an ad network dedicated to best practices and best placements, Undertone has identified three key practices for protecting online ads from impression and click fraud:

1. Engage the ad server as the first line of defense: Most ad servers allow advertisers to pull reports on the country of origin for impressions and clicks. Do your homework on your ad-serving platform to understand how they count and handle click fraud and closely monitor site visitors, time spent and activity related to each click. These related measurements will help you identify not only fraudulent activity, but which clicks are truly valuable.

2. Don’t pay for irrelevant international impressions: Up to 40 percent of publisher site traffic comes from outside of the United States and ad networks are used as a clearinghouse for this inventory. Too often unsuspecting advertisers are serving domestic creative to international audiences who can’t act. Unless international users are your target, specify U.S. traffic only in your insertion orders. A growing percentage of click fraud is through foreign IP addresses so monitoring this traffic will reduce your exposure.

3. Modify terms and conditions on media contracts: By far, the most proactive measure advertisers can take to prevent fraud is to modify the contracts they use with media partners. These amendments include specifically excluding incentivized traffic, use of ad exchange inventory, as well as practices like ad stacking and daisy-chaining which makes companies more vulnerable for click fraud.

Undertone values the work it does with agencies like OMD Worldwide, named AdWeek’s “2008 Global Agency of the Year,” and recognizes the threats that click fraud poses to the brands represented. To ensure brand safety, Undertone hand-acquires all of its inventory, ensuring above-the-fold placements, and works with only quality, professionally produced Web sites – all backed by Undertone’s Quality Guarantee.

“Click and impression fraud only highlight the need for clients and agencies to hold their network partners to a higher standard,” said Mike Cassidy, CEO, Undertone Networks. “While no network – or publisher – is 100 percent safe, we believe that Undertone can play an important role in helping to minimize the risk advertisers face.”

Underscoring the importance of addressing issues in click fraud and the need for better ad campaign measurement, Undertone conducted a webinar recently to address current concerns and discuss best practices for safeguarding agencies and advertisers against click fraud to ensure safety for their online campaigns. The webinar is available for download at: www.undertone.com.

About Undertone Networks

Undertone Networks, an online advertising network, provides advertisers with quality placements on the Web’s best sites. The company carefully selects its media partners and hand-purchases all its inventory, delivering above-the-fold visibility and brand protection for marketers who care where and when their ads run online. The Undertone approach ensures that media buyers and the advertisers they serve can drive successful brand awareness and direct response initiatives with a comprehensive blend of high-impact ad formats, rich media, targeting capabilities and personalized service. The company is based in New York, with fully staffed offices in major U.S. markets. For more information, visit www.undertone.com.

Proprietary Tool Reduces Rate of Fraud

SHERMAN OAKS, Calif. – In its aggressive campaign to protect online advertisers against click fraud, Advertise.com announced that its patented ClickShield™ technology will be integrated with its Display Advertising Network. Advertise.com is a premier network for search, display and cost-per-action (CPA) marketing. Advertise.com’s search advertising already benefits from this anti-fraud technology to protect against click fraud.

Adding click fraud protection across display advertising gives advertisers the power to add and remove traffic sources immediately based on real-time information and a level of transparency rarely available from other online ad networks. The Advertise.com display platform utilizes its publisher network using behavioral targeting, vertical channel targeting, geo-targeting and Remarketing, to boost advertisers’ display ad performance.

ClickShield is Advertise.com’s patented and independently-certified fraud-monitoring technology which identifies and removes low performing traffic. ClickShield optimizes the Advertise.com ad network by ensuring that clicks are “scrubbed” from fraudulent activities. This is done based on user behavior patterns and other proprietary methods.

“ClickShield™ has proven very successful on our Search Network, so it only makes sense to apply it to our display traffic,” said Daniel Yomtobian, CEO of Advertise.com. “Display advertising has gone too long without a tool to dynamically track and keep the traffic clean.”

Yomtobian believes that there is a reason the Display Advertising Industry is behind in click fraud protection. “Many display ads are billed on a CPM, so there’s the perception that advertisers haven’t cared about click fraud; they’ve paid for a set amount of impressions. With PPC there’s been more focus on the click and subsequently on click fraud.”

Advertisers will see greater ROI on traffic as high quality sources are added to the network faster while poor quality sources are removed immediately. This process gives advertisers control over where and when their ads show by allowing low-performing traffic channels to be automatically identified and turned off. This saves advertising dollars by delivering only the traffic that converts best.

ABOUT ADVERTISE.COM

Advertise.com is a premier platform for search, display and performance marketing enabling advertisers to reach a wider audience through our exclusive network of search engines and publisher properties. Founded in 2001 as privately held pay-per-click (PPC) search network ABCSearch.com, the company was re-launched in April 2009 as Advertise.com, Inc. We continue to lead the charge in online advertising, connecting thousands of advertisers with millions of consumers every day – now delivering over 10 billion ad impressions each month.

Our mission is to provide online marketers with easy and effective online marketing solutions including high-quality PPC traffic, cost-per-action (CPA) marketing, banner ads, and remarketing opportunities. Using our patented ClickShield fraud protection software, Advertise.com is dedicated to providing the most qualified and affordable options available for search and display advertising.

Headquartered in Sherman Oaks, California, Advertise.com has more than 75 employees in the US and India with a portfolio of brands including ABCSearch and the award-winning social search engine Scour.com.

Follow Advertise.com on Twitter at twitter.com/Advertisedotcom.

Online Audience Verification Platform Improves Search Advertising Traffic Sent to Merchants

AUSTIN, Texas – While millions of online shoppers will turn to comparison shopping engines before making a purchase this holiday season, many visitors to these sites will be botnets looking to steal money from merchants. To help ensure shoppers are qualified before passing them on to merchant partners, Click Forensics®, Inc.  unveiled a new online audience verification platform at the ad:tech New York conference, which comparison shopping engines and other content aggregators can use to measure the quality of site visitors and their likelihood to make a purchase. The technology also allows comparison shopping engines to match the revenue they receive from merchants to the investments they make in SEM campaigns in order to maximize profits.

“Comparison shopping engines and other content aggregators need a simple way to optimize the money they spend on search engine marketing, while improving the quality of leads they send on to merchant partners,” said Paul Pellman, CEO of Click Forensics. “The solution we’re delivering today does just that. To our knowledge, it’s the only system available that provides the ability for content aggregators to manage traffic acquisition and traffic monetization in a single interface.”

The new Click Forensics audience verification platform for content aggregators measures and analyzes each paid click to determine its value to the site and its merchant partners. The platform can be tuned to block certain types of online traffic that deliver poor ROI, while helping aggregators increase spend on more profitable site visitors. As a result, content aggregators can increase profitability and improve relations with merchant partners, who are more carefully scrutinizing the quality of traffic they accept. Key features of the new online audience verification platform include:

* High-Volume Campaign Support – the platform is capable of measuring the quality of tens of millions of clicks, which can support the increase in demand during the busy holiday season.
* Real-Time Quality-based Filtering – prevents fraudulent and low-quality traffic from reaching merchants, which helps to optimize ad spend and retain advertisers and merchants.
* API Integration – allows the organization to integrate the online audience verification platform directly with existing internal reporting and billing systems. In addition, the API integration can be used to augment in-house filtering solutions.
* Browser-based Reporting – all traffic can be viewed via a powerful browser-based dashboard, which allows customers to drill down into audience quality statistics for individual merchants, partners, campaigns and ad providers. Content aggregators can also analyze the incoming and outgoing traffic flows through a single interface.

The power of the Click Forensics online audience verification and traffic quality management platform is derived from monitoring online media traffic across over 300 ad networks as well as billions of clicks from top search engines, content aggregators, leading publishers and advertiser web sites – providing the most complete and holistic view of search and online advertising traffic quality. Combining more than three years of online advertising data and patent-pending heuristics to measure and score traffic quality in real-time, the best and worst sources are flagged so advertisers, publishers, content aggregators and ad networks can select only the kind of traffic they want in order to improve the overall performance of online campaigns.

For more information on Click Forensics, visit www.clickforensics.com. Follow us on Twitter: @ClickForensics.

About Click Forensics, Inc.

Click Forensics is the industry leader in audience verification and traffic quality improvement for the online advertising community. Click Forensics provides audience verification and traffic quality management solutions for leading online advertisers, publishers and ad networks, including companies such as Yahoo!, eBay, Progressive Insurance, Experian, Nextag, Moxy Media, Turn, Traffic Engine, Vegas.com and many others. The company also regularly publishes industry data on online advertising audience quality. Click Forensics is headquartered in Austin, Texas, and is privately held with funding from Sierra Ventures, Austin Ventures, Shasta Ventures and Stanford University. More information on Click Forensics and its offerings is available at www.ClickForensics.com.

Egypt and Indonesia Join Vietnam as Emerging Hotbeds of Attempted Click Fraud

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. – Anchor Intelligence, the leading provider of traffic quality solutions, released the Q3 Anchor Intelligence Traffic Quality Report. In the third quarter of 2009, the Anchor Intelligence network saw the average attempted click fraud rate fall from 22.9% in Q2 to 18.6% in Q3 – a decrease of almost 19%. Anchor Intelligence attributes this decline to two major factors: increased vigilance and enforcement of traffic quality standards by current Anchor customers, as well as slightly lower attempted click fraud rates among new Anchor network customers.

“Anchor customers were able to leverage ClearMark traffic quality scores to filter out poor quality traffic and evict fraudulent publishers, which contributed to the decline in the attempted click fraud rate this quarter,” said Ken Miller, CEO of Anchor Intelligence. “By cutting off the revenue stream for many click fraud operations, Anchor Intelligence has effectively convinced perpetrators to look outside of the Anchor network for vulnerabilities.”

In addition to the network-level rates, Anchor Intelligence also reported traffic quality rates for the top 30 countries by traffic volume. The countries with the highest attempted click fraud rates were Vietnam (30.2%), Egypt (29.6%), and Indonesia (25.5%). The majority of this traffic was the result of large-scale, coordinated click fraud rings and high velocity botnet traffic. Meanwhile, the U.S. and Canada continued to show high attempted click fraud rates at 21.2% and 20.8% respectively, which is noteworthy given that these countries account for the greater part of overall traffic volume.

“While network level attempted click fraud rates have declined, the methods used to perpetrate click fraud have grown in sophistication and variety,” said Richard Sim, VP of Product Management and Marketing. “Advertisements have become an increasingly common infection vector for payloads like browser hijackers and other forms of malware. Ad networks and search engines should pay close attention to such threats as we enter the holiday season.”

ClearMark, Anchor’s real-time traffic scoring system, classifies traffic according to quality, enabling customers to differentiate invalid traffic from valid traffic in stream before it can impact advertiser spend. Additionally, ClearMark distinguishes between attempted click fraud – clicks or impressions generated with malicious intent, for which advertisers have not necessarily been billed – and other invalid traffic, such as double clicks, traffic from self-identified robots, and internal clicks. Based on Anchor’s analysis of data from customers, the average invalid rate for Anchor customers declined considerably from 27.1% in Q2 for 23.2% in Q3. The Q3 invalid rate was comprised of an 18.6% average attempted click fraud rate and a 4.6% other invalid rate.

The “Anchor Intelligence Traffic Quality Report” follows “The Uninvited Guest: A Browser Hijacking Experience, Dissected,” which was recently released to help educate the industry on ways to avoid browser hijackers and minimize their consumption of ad spend this holiday season. The “Anchor Intelligence Traffic Quality Report: Q3 2009” is available to qualified ad networks and members of the online advertising industry. For more information, click here: http://www.anchorintelligence.com/anchor/resources/category/traffic_quality_report/.

Anchor Intelligence will also be present at ad:tech New York. Visit us at booth #2135 to learn more.

About Anchor Intelligence:

Anchor Intelligence Inc., headquartered in Mountain View, CA, is the traffic quality solutions provider of choice among ad networks, search engines, and advertisers from across the globe. Using Anchor Intelligence’s ClearMark, the industry’s first and only real-time traffic scoring system, industry players obtain the necessary intelligence to fight click and impression fraud, efficiently manage traffic sources, and capitalize on high quality clicks while maximizing advertiser ROI. For more information, visit: www.anchorintelligence.com. Follow us on Twitter: @AnchorIntel.

Auto-Generated and Consolidated Reports Improve Performance by Tracking All Critical Campaign Metrics Within a Single Document for Immediate Adjustment as Needed

SAN MATEO, Calif. – SearchForce, a SEM and bid optimization platform company, announced it has launched an auto-generated, overall performance summary that will significantly aid search engine marketers and agencies with a simpler workflow and reporting solution. SearchForce’s SEM management platform now allows agencies to easily produce an advanced report that addresses all important campaign metrics within a single document that can be automatically emailed to pre-designated recipients. This requires a simple, one-time set up of the desired information, including campaign data and trend charts, cross publisher metric distributions and keyword assist patterns, referring domains and search query data to name a few.

“This overall reporting system eliminates the tedious and time-consuming act of having to stitch together multiple reports into one,” said Dhiren DSouza, president and co-founder, SearchForce. “Now clients can employ a reporting mechanism that tracks a campaign in greater depth than ever before within any SEM and bid optimization platform. This not only streamlines the reporting process, but also enables search engine marketers to quickly identify and react to market trends and statistics, boosting overall performance.”

“SearchForce has built a unique reporting solution that addresses the entire workflow of SEM – from organizing complex data to creating advanced workbooks with relevant metrics and reporting,” said Peter Amerio, Pay Per Click Marketing Manager at Platform Ad. “It’s not only important to look at what has transpired but it’s also a vital tool for strategizing and succeeding on future campaigns. Plus, this saves us hours of time and resources every day since to date we’ve had to consolidate this data by hand.”

Click here to see a screen grab of the new report.

New features with this version include an integrated creative A/B testing solution, advanced campaign editing capabilities and enhancements to the dynamic keyword segmentation and portfolio optimization framework.

About SearchForce

Founded in 2004, SearchForce provides a sophisticated, highly customizable technology platform for agencies, brands and buyers looking for a competitive edge in bid optimization, campaign management and reporting. Developed for strategic marketers, SearchForce is the only company offering a truly customizable and seamlessly scalable bid optimization and campaign management platform to meet specific SEM needs and objectives. SearchForce’s platform allows customers to effectively manage large-scale, paid search marketing campaigns across Google, Yahoo!, MSN to deliver higher returns at a lower cost, and with less work. The company’s software is used by some of the largest online advertisers, advertising agencies and corporations around the globe. For more information, call 650-235-8777 or visit searchforce.com.

NEW YORK – Reportlinker.com announces that a new market research report is available in its catalogue, Search Marketing Trends: Back to Basics.

As the recession forces many customers to buy less—and be pickier about what they do buy—search is becoming ever more important to marketers. It is the best customer acquisition tool online. The Search Marketing Trends report analyzes the factors

The Search Marketing Trends report analyzes the factors that are driving consumers, followed by marketers, to online search engines.

When money is tight, consumers are constantly looking for deals. And, today, that means they are going online to search for better prices, selection and services. If they find them—forget brand loyalty—they will switch to new products or vendors in a clickbeat.

Marketers have four basic search options: paid search, contextual advertising, paid inclusion—all three are types of advertising—and search engine optimization (SEO).

While paid search gets most of the attention and money, marketers are increasingly turning to SEO to acquire new customers.

All four options will experience increased spending through 2013. By then total US search marketing outlays will reach nearly $23.4 billion, and marketers will be spending more on SEO than on contextual advertising.

Key questions the “Search Marketing Trends” report answers:

What elements of search marketing perform best in a recession?
Why will SEO get more attention over the next five years?
How does search marketing complement e-mail marketing?
Which metrics make the most sense for search marketers?
How can Web analytics help marketers make better buying decisions?
How do users’ search habits influence where marketers should focus their search activities?
And many others…

Executive Summary

US Search Engine Marketing Spending, by Type, 20082013 (millions)

Key Questions

Key Numbers Search Marketing Trends

Search Tactics: Paid and Organic

US Search Engine Marketing Spending Share, by Type, 20082013 (% of total and millions)

Types of SEM Programs Engaged in by Search Advertisers Worldwide, by Company Size, December 2007January 2008 (% of respondents)

US Search Engine Marketing Spending, by Type, 20082013 (millions)

US Search Engine Marketing Spending Growth, by Type, 20082013 (% change)

Agencies

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) Spending in North America, by Tactic, 2007

Average Amount that Clients of Search Engine Marketing (SEM) Agencies Worldwide Spend on Search Engine Marketing Programs, 20052007 (% of total and thousands)

Attitudes of US Online Marketers Toward Paid Search* Marketing vs. Search Engine Optimization (SEO), 2008 (% of respondents)

ROI in 2009 for Select Online Marketing Tactics According to US Online Marketers (% of respondents)

SEO Features

Growth of Organic vs. Paid Clicks for US Online Retailers, by Retail Category, Q2 2008 (% change vs. Q2 2007)

Search Results Most Relevant to Query* According to US Internet Users, by Type, 2004 (as a % of respondents)

Attitudes of US Internet Users Toward Sponsored Links that Appear in Their Search Results, September 2008 (% of respondents)

Types of Ads/Promotions that US Internet Users Find Acceptable or Annoying, SeptemberOctober 2008 (% of respondents)

Most Important Marketing Tactics According to US Marketing Executives, 2008 & 2009 (% of respondents)

Attitudes of Search Marketers Worldwide* Toward Search Engine Optimization During the Economic Crisis, 2008 (% of respondents)

Search Marketing Objectives

Objectives of SEM According to Search Advertisers Worldwide, by Company Size, December 2007January 2008 (% of respondents)

Branded Trademark Search Among US Internet Users Exposed to Online Display Ads, 2008

Advertising Goals for 2009 According to Marketers Worldwide, by Level of Importance (% of respondents)

Metrics and Analytics

Average US Search ClickThrough Rate (CTR), by Search Engine, Q4 2007Q4 2008

Average US Search Cost per Click (CPC), by Search Engine, Q4 2007Q4 2008

Metrics Used by Search Engine Advertisers and Search Engine Marketing (SEM) Agencies Worldwide to Measure Success of SEM Campaigns, December 2007 (% of respondents)

Projections

US Paid Search Metrics, 20082013

US Paid Search Metrics, 20082011

Search Analytics

Marketing Technologies/Services that US CMOs Use or Plan to Use, October 2008 (% of respondents)

US Online Marketers Who Have Set Aside a Budget for Select Online Marketing Tactics, 20062008 (% of respondents)

Companies and Agencies Worldwide* that Have a Companywide Strategy that Ties Data Collection and Analysis to Business Objectives, MarchApril 2008 (% of respondents)

Purpose of Web Analytics in Organizations According to Web Analytics Users Worldwide*, OctoberDecember 2008 (% of respondents)

Usage of Predictive Analytics Among Search Marketers Worldwide, by Performance Level, SeptemberOctober 2008 (% of respondents)

Areas of Knowledge that Web Analytics Users Worldwide* Would Most Like to Improve, OctoberDecember 2008 (% of respondents)

Analytics Solutions Used by Web Analytics Users Worldwide*, OctoberDecember 2008 (% of respondents)

Search Analytics Programs Used Most by US Search Marketers, May 2007 & May 2008 (% of respondents)

Search Analytics Programs Used by Search Marketers Worldwide*, 2008 (% of respondents)

The Search Audience

Daily Online Activities of US Internet Users, AprilMay 2008 (% of respondents)

US Search Engine Users* and Search Ad Users**, 20072013 (millions)

US Search Engine Users* and Search Ad Users** as a Percent of Total Internet Users, 20072013

US Search Engine User* and Search Ad User** Growth, 20072013 (% change)

US Search Engine Marketing Spending per Search Engine User, 20082013

Growth of US Search Engine Marketing Spending per Search Engine User, 20082013 (% change)

Search Engine Usage

Search Queries per US Internet User, 20062011

Comparative Estimates: Top Five Search Engines in the US, Ranked by Share of Searches, December 2008

Search Advertising Spending by US Companies, by Search Engine, Q4 2007Q4 2008 (% share)

US Customer Satisfaction with Web Portals and Search Engines, Q2 2002Q2 2008 (based on a 100point scale*)

Reasons that US Internet Users Would Switch Search Engines, by Search Engine Used Most Frequently, November 2008 (% of respondents)

Conclusions

Endnotes

101258 | 101259 | 101260 | 101261 | 101262 | 101263

Key eMarketer NumbersSearch Marketing Trends

US Search Engine Marketing Spending, by Type, 20082013 (millions)

US Search Engine Marketing Spending Growth, by Type, 20082013 (% change)

US Search Engine Marketing Spending Share, by Type, 20082013 (% of total and millions)

US Search Engine Marketing Spending per Search Engine User, 20082013

Growth of US Search Engine Marketing Spending per Search Engine User, 20082013 (% change)

101321

Comparative Estimates: Top Five Search Engines in the US, Ranked by Share of Searches, December 2008

Related Information and Links

Related Links

Contact

Report Contributors

To order this report:

Search Marketing Trends: Back to Basics

http://www.reportlinker.com/p0128125/Search-Marketing-Trends-Back-to-Basics.html

Latest quarterly report shows Bing lost eight percent of first page advertisers in third quarter; Google and Yahoo! held steady

CHICAGO – AdGooroo (www.adgooroo.com), a leading provider of online marketing competitive intelligence and keyword tools, released its latest quarterly Search Engine Advertiser Update. The report contains eight pages of data, graphs and analysis on the performance of Google, Yahoo! and Bing during Q3 2009 and incorporates a new set of information not available in AdGooroo’s previous quarterly reports, the Most Expensive Keywords by Search Engine table.

AdGooroo tracked an eight percent reduction in Bing’s first page advertisers, but active Google and Yahoo! advertisers remained essentially unchanged from the second quarter. The latest report also included information on some of the highest priced keywords from each of the three search engines. At least one keyword sold for more than $99 per click through Google, $60 per click through Yahoo! and $55 through Bing.

“Many of the report’s readers look for changes in top advertisers by search engine and each engine’s overall growth and reduction in advertisers, and I hope others find the new pricing data valuable,” said AdGooroo Founder and CEO Rich Stokes. “Personally, in analyzing the data, Q3 struck me as a quarter of maturation for the industry. Each of the engines seems to be developing its own niche within the industry, and it will be interesting to see how they continue to evolve in the coming quarters and years ahead.”

In the report, Stokes argues that the industry has moved into a new stage of decelerated growth, where new advertisers are harder to acquire. He asserts that Google has become “the premium supplier of high-volume search traffic,” despite lagging behind Yahoo! and Bing when it comes to conversions. Yahoo! offers lower click volume but better conversion rates, and Bing provides “an excellent choice for unbranded, direct response types of sites with lower budgets,” according to the latest report.

Those interested in learning more can view and download a complimentary copy of the report, “Search Engine Advertising Update – Q309” in the AdGooroo Research Library: http://www.adgooroo.com/adgooroo_research_library.php.

About AdGooroo

AdGooroo provides online marketers and agencies actionable, on demand competitive intelligence tools that proactively monitor an industry’s advertising landscape to help them build a long-term competitive advantage. Based in Chicago, AdGooroo provides competitive intelligence to search engine marketers through its tool suite, including AdGooroo Express, SEM Insight and Trademark Insight. AdGooroo tools leverage access and automation to provide advertisers with lists of competitors’ top keywords, ad copy, campaign statistics and more. Top agencies and brand advertisers leverage AdGooroo competitive intelligence tools. For more information, visit AdGooroo.com.

New Platform Allows Ad Providers to Instantly Identify Good and Bad Traffic

AUSTIN, Texas – Click Forensics, Inc., announced the release of an enhanced version of its online audience quality monitoring platform that for the first time allows ad networks and publishers to instantly identify good and bad advertising traffic in the real-time click stream. By integrating the capabilities into their existing infrastructures, clients can better manage traffic sources to improve advertiser satisfaction and eCPM rates. The new capabilities also serve as the foundation for the real-time impression scoring engine currently being developed by Click Forensics, which will allow ad networks and publishers to make ad-serving decisions based on the quality of online visitors.

“In its simplest form, our real-time audience quality tracking capabilities make it possible for publishers and ad networks to immediately block bad site visitors from seeing ads, and show the right ads to the real buyers,” said Paul Pellman, CEO of Click Forensics. “This instantaneous audience quality determination is an important step in transforming the results that search, display and social ad providers deliver to their clients.”

The new real-time audience traffic analysis capabilities of the Click Forensics platform is made possible by a RESTful web service API that easily integrates into existing high-volume ad network infrastructures.

The enhanced platform can score requests and process responses in less than 10 milliseconds, excluding Internet latency. As a result, clients can instantly determine the quality of a site visitor, including if they’re real or not, before anyone has paid or is charged for the click. This helps ad networks and publishers to protect advertisers from paying for fraudulent and poor traffic sources, while allowing them to direct different types of good quality traffic sources to the advertisers that want them.

The Click Forensics traffic quality management platform allows ad networks, online advertisers, agencies and publishers to protect themselves against poor quality traffic, while targeting and delivering traffic sources that are more likely to convert into sales. The power of the platform is derived from monitoring online media traffic across over 300 ad networks as well as billions of clicks from top search engines, leading publishers and advertiser web sites – providing the most complete and holistic view of search and online advertising traffic quality. Combining more than three years of industry online advertising data and patent-pending heuristics to measure and score traffic quality in real-time, the best and worst traffic sources are flagged so advertisers, publishers and ad networks can select only the kind of traffic they want in order to improve the overall performance of online campaigns.

For more information on Click Forensics, visit www.clickforensics.com. Follow us on Twitter: @ClickForensics

About Click Forensics, Inc.

Click Forensics® is the industry leader in scoring, auditing and improving traffic quality for the online advertising community. Click Forensics provides traffic quality management solutions for leading online advertisers, publishers and ad networks, including companies such as Yahoo!, Progressive Insurance, Experian, Moxy Media, Nextag, Turn, Traffic Engine, Vegas.com and many others. The company also publishes the Click Fraud Index®, the top independent source of industry click fraud data. Click Forensics is headquartered in Austin, Texas, and is privately held with funding from Sierra Ventures, Austin Ventures, Shasta Ventures and Stanford University. More information on Click Forensics and its offerings is available at www.ClickForensics.com.

Click Forensics and Click Fraud Index are registered trademarks of Click Forensics, Inc. All other company and product names mentioned are used only for identification and may be trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies.

Malware-Distributed Botnet Masking Itself with High “Quality Scores”; Sending Fraudulent Search Traffic from U.S. Libraries, Schools and Consumer Laptops

AUSTIN, Texas – Click Forensics®, Inc. announced it has identified an unusually large spike in click fraud traffic coming from a new botnet that appears to be eluding the filters of even the most sophisticated search engines, publishers and ad networks.

Codenamed the “Bahama botnet” by Click Forensics, the malware distributed botnet is using coordinated methods to mask itself as a legitimate high-quality source of search advertising traffic. Click Forensics has tracked instances when the botnet’s attacks have affected up to 30 percent of an advertiser’s monthly search budget for a specific campaign. Additional background on the botnet can be found on the Click Forensics corporate blog at http://blog.clickforensics.com.

“During the past four years we’ve monitored billions of clicks for top search engines, ad networks, publishers and advertisers. This scheme is one of the most sophisticated we’ve seen,” said Paul Pellman, CEO of Click Forensics. “The botnet is effectively disguising the fraud it produces as ‘good traffic’ by altering the interval and breadth of the attacks across legions of infected machines.”

Click Forensics recently found links to the malware behind the Bahama botnet in Google search results for “Facebook Fan Check virus.” The malware program is extremely similar to the “scareware” or malvertising program found last weekend in advertisements on NYTimes.com. In that case, The New York Times identified the fraudulent ads and quickly alerted visitors not to click on them. Both malware programs attempt to trick users into downloading them by claiming to be antivirus fixes. However, they are really Trojan programs that enable third-parties to take over certain controls of the PCs that install them.

The Bahama botnet commits click fraud in a number of different ways. It can generate paid clicks by using normal user behavior to transform an organic search into a paid click. It can also leverage the network of bot-infected machines to programmatically auto-generate paid clicks without any human interaction. The dual nature of this botnet makes it a more powerful vehicle for committing click fraud than other kinds of click fraud botnets.

Click Forensics began tracking the botnet after noticing a sudden and sustained rise in strange traffic patterns in live click stream data from multiple sources, including ad networks and search engines as well as publisher and advertiser web sites. Click Forensics codenamed the botnet “Bahama” because when it was first detected it redirected traffic through 200,000 parked domains located in the Bahamas. The botnet has since been reprogrammed to redirect traffic through other intermediate sites hosted in Amsterdam, Netherlands; the United Kingdom; and San Jose, California.

In its onsite click fraud testing laboratory, Click Forensics has found only one antivirus program out of 20 popular ones capable of identifying and removing the malicious malware program responsible for bringing PCs under the control of the botnet. Click Forensics has reached out to leading security vendors like Symantec and McAfee for help removing the malware. It is also cooperating closely with top ad networks, search engines, advertisers and online publishers to ensure that traffic from the botnet is properly identified.

To access additional information and details on the new botnet, visit http://blog.clickforensics.com. For more information on Click Forensics, visit www.clickforensics.com. Follow us on Twitter: @ClickForensics.

About Click Forensics, Inc.

Click Forensics® is the industry leader in scoring, auditing and improving traffic quality for the online advertising community. Click Forensics provides traffic quality management solutions for leading online advertisers, publishers and ad networks, including companies such as Yahoo!, Progressive Insurance, Experian, Moxy Media, Nextag, Turn, Traffic Engine, Vegas.com and many others. The company also publishes the Click Fraud Index®, the top independent source of industry click fraud data. Click Forensics is headquartered in Austin, Texas, and is privately held with funding from Sierra Ventures, Austin Ventures, Shasta Ventures and Stanford University. More information on Click Forensics and its offerings is available at www.ClickForensics.com.

Click Forensics and Click Fraud Index are registered trademarks of Click Forensics, Inc. All other company and product names mentioned are used only for identification and may be trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies.

Lane’s Gifts vs. Google Settlement Case Advisor, Dr. Alexander Tuzhilin, to Help Improve Advertising Quality

AUSTIN, Texas – Click Forensics®, Inc. the industry leader in scoring, auditing and managing traffic quality for the online advertising community, announced it has appointed Dr. Alexander Tuzhilin to the Click Forensics Board of Advisors. The appointment is part of a continued effort by Click Forensics to work with the industry’s top experts on the development of technology solutions for optimizing traffic quality and improving results for online advertising.

“Having firsthand experience reviewing the state of the art in ad network traffic management, I was impressed with the technical sophistication of the team and its plans for the future,” said Dr. Tuzhilin. “Click Forensics has played a leadership role in helping the online advertising community to monitor the quality of clicks on ads, including identification of invalid clicks. I look forward to continuing to work with the team as it takes its work to the next level.”

Dr. Alexander Tuzhilin is a Professor of Information Systems and the NEC Faculty Fellow at the Stern School of Business at New York University.

His current research interests include data mining, personalization, recommender systems and click fraud detection. He has published over 90 papers in the leading CS and IS journals and conference proceedings on these and other research topics. Dr. Tuzhilin’s 2005 IEEE TKDE paper “Towards the next generation of recommender systems…” with Gedas Adomavicius was listed among the top-10 most frequently cited journal papers published in the whole of Computer Science over the past 5 years, according to the Scopus’ TopCited service (as of August 2009). He received his B.A. degree in mathematics from NYU, M.S. degree in engineering economics from Stanford, and Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, NYU. In addition to NYU, he has held visiting positions at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, Columbia University, and Ecole Nationale Superieure des Telecommunications (Paris, France).

“Dr. Tuzhilin has extensive experience in advanced fraud detection, recommender systems and data mining, which will prove invaluable to enhancing the benefits our traffic quality optimization technology brings to the $25 billion online advertising industry,” said Paul Pellman, CEO of Click Forensics. “We look forward to working with him and our Advisory Board to further improve online advertising traffic quality for all.”

The power of the Click Forensics traffic quality management solutions is derived from monitoring online media traffic across over 300 ad networks as well as billions of clicks from top search engines, leading publishers and advertiser web sites – providing the most complete and holistic view of search and online advertising traffic quality. Combining more than three years of industry online advertising data and patent-pending heuristics to measure and score traffic quality in real-time, the best and worst traffic sources are flagged by Click Forensics solutions so advertisers, publishers and ad networks can select only the kind of traffic they want in order to improve the overall performance of online campaigns.

For more information on Click Forensics, visit www.clickforensics.com. Follow us on Twitter: @ClickForensics.

About Click Forensics, Inc.

Click Forensics® is the industry leader in scoring, auditing and improving traffic quality for the online advertising community. Click Forensics provides traffic quality management solutions for leading online advertisers, publishers and ad networks, including companies such as Yahoo!, Progressive Insurance, Local.com, Experian, Nextag, Turn, Traffic Engine, Vegas.com and many others. The company also publishes the Click Fraud Index®, the top independent source of industry click fraud data. Click Forensics is headquartered in Austin, Texas, and is privately held with funding from Sierra Ventures, Austin Ventures, Shasta Ventures and Stanford University. More information on Click Forensics and its offerings is available at www.ClickForensics.com.

Partners with Click Forensics for Real-time Scoring & Filtering of Online Advertising Traffic

AUSTIN, Texas – Click Forensics, Inc., the industry leader in scoring, auditing and improving traffic quality for the online advertising community, entered into a click filtering and traffic quality scoring arrangement with Affinity, a fast-growing text-based advertising platform. Affinity will use Click Forensics services for all of its advertisers, publishers and partners. Affinity is the latest in a series of large online advertising networks adopting an independent 3rd party real-time click filtering platform to combat click fraud.

“We have now fortified our internal defense system with Click Forensics to provide advertisers better value for their advertising budgets. Advertisers are now confident that we will only charge them for clicks validated by an independent third-party source,” said Namit Merchant, President – Affinity. “We also benefit from their specialization as they aggregate data from multiple ad networks, which makes them an expert at the game.”

The Click Forensics traffic quality management platform allows ad networks, online advertisers, agencies and publishers to protect themselves against poor quality traffic, while targeting and delivering traffic sources that are more likely to convert into sales. For Affinity, Click Forensics will help better manage traffic from publishers by providing a score for every paid click, which indicates the likely conversion rate of traffic sources. Click Forensics will also allow Affinity to perform instantaneous filtering of invalid traffic and fraud, including publisher collusion fraud, which occurs when online publishers use rotating IP-addresses or botnets to click ads on their own sites in order to generate inflated commissions from unprotected ad networks.

“In addition to click filtering, the Click Forensics scoring technology will allow us to discount advertiser bid prices based on varying publisher quality levels. Advertisers will now have access to quality scores for each traffic source, resulting in more transparency and efficient spending of advertising dollars,” added Namit Merchant.

“Affinity has made traffic quality management a number one priority for its business, so they performed a careful evaluation of all available solutions,” said Steve O’Brien, vice president of marketing for Click Forensics. “As a result, we are excited to be selected by Affinity to help grow its business even faster and more profitably than ever before.”

The power of the Click Forensics traffic quality management platform is derived from monitoring online media traffic across over 300 ad networks as well as billions of clicks from top search engines, leading publishers and advertiser web sites – providing the most complete and holistic view of search and online advertising traffic quality. Combining more than three years of industry online advertising data and patent-pending heuristics to measure and score traffic quality in real-time, the best and worst traffic sources are flagged so advertisers, publishers and ad networks can select only the kind of traffic they want in order to improve the overall performance of online campaigns.

About Affinity

Affinity is a technology-driven online advertising company that provides high performance solutions for online publishers and advertisers. Affinity network of publishers consists of search engines, toolbars, domain parking sites, in-text ad units, contextual banners, comparison-shopping engines, local business sites, and other social media applications. Affinity’s flagship search monetization product delivers 10 billion ad impressions to 75,000+ advertisers, each month.

Affinity is an independently operated subsidiary of Hostway Corporation. Founded in 1998, Hostway is one of the world’s largest web hosting companies with a direct presence in 13 countries, 17 worldwide operation centers and more than 700 employees. Hostway provides web solutions to over 1.4 million web sites and 2 million customers worldwide. For more information about Affinity, visit www.affinity.com.

About Click Forensics, Inc.

Click Forensics is the industry leader in scoring, auditing and improving traffic quality for the online advertising community. Click Forensics provides traffic quality management solutions for leading online advertisers, publishers and ad networks, including companies such as Yahoo!, eBay, Progressive Insurance, Experian, Nextag, Infospace, Turn, Traffic Engine, Vegas.com and many others. The company also publishes the Click Fraud Index®, the top independent source of industry click fraud data. Click Forensics is headquartered in Austin, Texas, and is privately held with funding from Sierra Ventures, Austin Ventures, Shasta Ventures and Stanford University. More information on Click Forensics and its offerings is available at www.ClickForensics.com.

Click Forensics and Click Fraud Index are registered trademarks of Click Forensics, Inc. All other company and product names mentioned are used only for identification and may be trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies.

SAN JOSE, Calif. – At the Search Engine Strategies (SES) Conference & Expo, Click Forensics®, Inc. unveiled a new traffic quality dashboard that helps ad networks and publishers more easily pinpoint good and bad online advertising traffic sources. A feature of the Click Forensics traffic quality management platform, the dashboard is designed to help clients better manage downstream publishers and affiliates and adjust online traffic sources and campaigns to improve quality and performance goals.

“Our new dashboard provides a powerful and simple way for ad networks and publishers to figure out who’s sending bad traffic and who’s sending good traffic to CPC and display ads,” said Paul Pellman, CEO of Click Forensics. “Ad networks and publishers can use the information to increase the quality of traffic they deliver, resulting in improved advertiser retention and spend.”

The new Click Forensics dashboard is accessible via web browser and can be used to identify, filter and block traffic that shouldn’t be billed or paid for. Ad networks use the tool to determine which publishers are reliable traffic sources. Publishers can leverage the dashboard to monitor traffic quality from affiliates and sub-publisher sites so they can deliver better results for advertisers. Other high-level features include:

* Click Type Identification – identifies 15 different categories of click types, including click fraud, out-of-geo clicks, double-clicks, volume spikes and sources of publisher collusion-fraud. In addition, it pinpoints sources of botnet attacks and spiders as well as traffic from co-location facilities.
* Traffic Source Scoring – scores individual sources of online advertising traffic so publishers and ad networks can view the overall traffic quality they’re experiencing at any given time. Users can drill down into specific publishers, sub-publishers and advertisers for detailed information on click quality sources and destinations of high- and low-quality traffic.
* Web Site Screening Tool – provides publishers and ad networks with a consolidated view of all publicly available information on a particular web site’s traffic quality, including WHOIS and registrant information as well as one-click access to traffic volume statistics from Alexa and Compete. In addition, it includes up-to-date traffic quality data collected from the Click Forensics community.
* ‘Movers and Shakers’ View – flags traffic sources with significant changes in volume or quality. The information can be used to alert publishers and ad networks of potential areas of concerns as well as traffic sources that have significantly improved or degraded in quality.

The Click Forensics traffic quality management platform allows ad networks, online advertisers, agencies and publishers to protect themselves against poor quality traffic, while targeting and delivering traffic sources that are more likely to convert into sales. The power of the platform is derived from monitoring online media traffic across over 300 ad networks as well as billions of clicks from top search engines, leading publishers and advertiser web sites – providing the most complete and holistic view of search and online advertising traffic quality. Combining more than three years of industry online advertising data and patent-pending heuristics to measure and score traffic quality in real-time, the best and worst traffic sources are flagged so advertisers, publishers and ad networks can select only the kind of traffic they want in order to improve the overall performance of online campaigns.

For more information on the new Click Forensics online advertising traffic quality dashboard, visit booth #321 at SES San Jose or www.clickforensics.com.

About Click Forensics, Inc.

Click Forensics is the industry leader in scoring, auditing and improving traffic quality for the online advertising community. Click Forensics provides traffic quality management solutions for leading online advertisers, publishers and ad networks, including companies such as Yahoo!, eBay, Progressive Insurance, Experian, Nextag, Infospace, Turn, Traffic Engine, Vegas.com and many others. The company also publishes the Click Fraud Index®, the top independent source of industry click fraud data. Click Forensics is headquartered in Austin, Texas, and is privately held with funding from Sierra Ventures, Austin Ventures, Shasta Ventures and Stanford University. More information on Click Forensics and its offerings is available at www.ClickForensics.com.

Click Forensics and Click Fraud Index are registered trademarks of Click Forensics, Inc. All other company and product names mentioned are used only for identification and may be trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies.

Publisher Collusion Fraud Remains a Significant Threat to Ad Networks

AUSTIN, Texas – Click Forensics®, Inc. released industry pay-per-click (PPC) fraud figures for the second quarter 2009 from the search advertising industry’s leading independent click fraud reporting service – the Click Fraud Index®. Now in its fourth year, the Click Fraud Index provides statistically significant industry PPC data collected from online advertising campaigns for both large and small advertisers across all leading search engines. Traffic across more than 300 ad networks is also reflected in the data. Key findings for Q2 2009 include:

* The overall industry average click fraud rate was 12.7 percent. That’s down from 13.8 percent for Q1 2009 and from the 16.2 percent rate reported for Q2 2008.
* Click fraud traffic from sophisticated sources and scripted programs rose again in Q2 2009. This included a rise in the incidents of publisher collusion fraud on ad networks.

“The increased diligence of online ad networks to detect and block invalid traffic sources has contributed to the decline in the overall click fraud rate this quarter,” said Tom Cuthbert, president of Click Forensics. “However, increasingly sophisticated attacks, such as publisher collusion fraud, continue to be a concern. Ad networks should pay close attention to such threats in the coming months.”

The data in Q2 also showed that many of the new click fraud schemes identified last quarter continue to increase in number and sophistication. Publisher collusion fraud was one example. This scheme occurs when online publishers use rotating IP-addresses or botnets to click ads on their own sites in order to generate inflated commissions from unprotected ad networks. Ad networks have difficultly differentiating such attacks from valid clicks.

The Click Fraud Index publishes data collected from the industry’s first independent third-party click fraud detection service dedicated to helping companies more accurately monitor their online advertising campaigns for pay-per-click fraud. The service is unique in that it monitors online campaigns for click fraud by correlating advertising campaign data collected from search providers, over 300 ad networks and the advertisers’ own web sites – providing the industry’s most accurate view of click fraud to date.

About Click Forensics, Inc.

Click Forensics is the industry leader in scoring, auditing and improving traffic quality for the online advertising community. Click Forensics provides traffic quality management solutions for leading online advertisers, publishers and ad networks, including companies such as Yahoo!, eBay, Progressive Insurance, Experian, Nextag, Infospace, Turn, Traffic Engine, Vegas.com and many others. The company also publishes the Click Fraud Index®, the top independent source of industry click fraud data. Click Forensics is headquartered in Austin, Texas, and is privately held with funding from Sierra Ventures, Austin Ventures, Shasta Ventures and Stanford University. More information on Click Forensics and its offerings is available at www.ClickForensics.com.

NEW YORK – Recognizing the need to protect buyers, sellers and ultimately all consumers from click fraud, the interactive advertising industry has made it a priority to standardize click-count measurement across media companies. The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) applauded Business.com, Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo! for being the first organizations to pass audits for the IAB’s recently released Click Measurement Guidelines. Issued last month, the guidelines provide a rigorous methodology for companies to define and measure valid clicks and identify and eliminate fraudulent ones, establishing parameters for the accurate buying and selling of cost-per-click advertising.

Independent, third-party audits that certify media companies against the Click Measurement Guidelines provide assurance to buyers of online media that those audited companies are adhering to high standards of rigor and transparency in their click-counting methodologies.

“The three largest search engines represent more than 95 percent of all U.S. searches, which in the month of May 2009 equaled more than 13 billion searches. Completing those companies’ click measurement audits represents a significant milestone in the war on click fraud,” said Joe Laszlo, research director of the IAB. “However, these guidelines also serve a broader audience of advertising buyers and sellers, and the participation of the leading business search engine in these audits points the way for other publishers selling cost-per-click ads to be audited against the guidelines as well.”

“We applaud these member companies for swiftly adopting the IAB’s Click Measurement Guidelines,” said Randall Rothenberg, President and CEO of the IAB. “We are confident that this initial group will be followed by many other organizations in our membership who recognize these guidelines as one of the most important ways to assure marketers that the clicks they pay for are real.”

To view the complete Click Measurement Guidelines, please go to: www.iab.net/clickmeasurementguidelines

About the IAB’s Click Measurement Working Group:

The Click Measurement Working Group includes representatives from 38 IAB member companies, including sellers, measurers and auditors of online media. Initiated in late 2005, the working group, together with the Media Rating Council, has spent the last three years developing these important guidelines and achieving consensus around them.

About the IAB:

The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) is comprised of more than 375 leading media and technology companies who are responsible for selling 86% of online advertising in the United States. On behalf of its members, the IAB is dedicated to the growth of the interactive advertising marketplace, of interactive’s share of total marketing spend, and of its members’ share of total marketing spend. The IAB educates marketers, agencies, media companies and the wider business community about the value of interactive advertising. Working with its member companies, the IAB evaluates and recommends standards and practices and fields critical research on interactive advertising. Founded in 1996, the IAB is headquartered in New York City with a Public Policy office in Washington, D.C. For more information, please visit www.iab.net.

New Tool Helps Boost Campaign Performance and ROI for Ad Networks

AUSTIN, Texas – Click Forensics®, Inc., the industry leader in scoring, auditing and improving traffic quality for the online advertising community, expanded its Click Forensics traffic quality management platform with a new “Block List” feature. The feature provides ad networks with the immediate benefits of a continually updated list of visitor IP addresses and publishers known to generate online advertising fraud or invalid traffic, including sources of publisher “collusion fraud.” The tool can be used in concert with the real-time Click Forensics platform to block bad traffic sources and to shift online advertising dollars toward sources that deliver better results.

The Block List protection feature is in part made possible by the built-in publisher collusion detection capabilities of the Click Forensics platform. Collusion fraud schemes occur when online publishers use rotating IP-addresses or botnets to click ads on their own sites in order to generate inflated commissions from unprotected ad networks. Collusion fraud is difficult to differentiate from valid clicks. However, by using advanced data mining techniques, such as high-dimensional cluster analysis, the Click Forensics platform is able to pinpoint and report on both the offending publishers and clicking IP-addresses, which are then added to the Block List. The Block List is updated daily and made available to clients as data and insight is collected from the Click Forensics network.

“Our new Block List is a quick first step for ad networks looking for information on some of the best and worst online traffic sources,” said Paul Pellman, CEO of Click Forensics. “They can use it to help their clients make the most of their online advertising investments.”

As a feature of the Click Forensics traffic quality management platform, the Block List includes traffic sources that Click Forensics has identified and tracked over the years for the world’s top ad networks, advertisers and online publishers. Examples of blocked traffic sources include:
Publishers committing click fraud;
IP addresses of visitors known to commit a high level of fraud;
IP address ranges generating non-human traffic, such as co-location facilities; and
Other traffic sources that generate hacker attacks and spam.

“The Click Forensics Block List feature is an invaluable tool to help us protect our advertisers and deliver better results,” said Evan Balafas, Managing Director of Excite Digital Media, a leading search advertising network. “Just as we proactively protect our own computers from viruses and malware threats, we need to continually do the same for our advertisers so they get the most out of the millions of dollars they spend online.”

The Click Forensics traffic quality management platform monitors online media traffic across over 300 ad networks as well as billions of clicks from top search engines, leading publishers and advertiser web sites – providing the most complete and holistic view of search and online advertising traffic quality. Combining more than three years of industry online advertising data and patent-pending heuristics to measure and score traffic quality in real-time, the best and worst traffic sources are flagged by Click Forensics solutions so advertisers, publishers and ad networks can select only the kind of traffic they want in order to improve the overall performance of online campaigns.

For more information on Click Forensics and its offerings, visit www.clickforensics.com.

About Click Forensics, Inc.

Click Forensics is the industry leader in scoring, auditing and improving traffic quality for the online advertising community. Click Forensics provides traffic quality management solutions for leading online advertisers, publishers and ad networks, including companies such as Yahoo!, eBay, Progressive Insurance, Experian, Nextag, Infospace, Turn, Traffic Engine, Vegas.com and many others. The company also publishes the Click Fraud Index®, the top independent source of industry click fraud data. Click Forensics is headquartered in Austin, Texas, and is privately held with funding from Sierra Ventures, Austin Ventures, Shasta Ventures and Stanford University. More information on Click Forensics and its offerings is available at www.ClickForensics.com.

Click Forensics and Click Fraud Index are registered trademarks of Click Forensics, Inc. All other company and product names mentioned are used only for identification and may be trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies.

Advertisers and Publishers Benefit from Enhanced Protection against Click Fraud

BURLINGTON, Mass. – Burst Media, a leading provider of advertising representation, services and technology to independent Web Publishers, announced a partnership with Anchor Intelligence, the foremost provider of traffic quality solutions that assess search and publisher ad inventory. The partnership enhances Burst’s existing inventory auditing systems with additional visibility into site traffic quality, and gives advertisers an enhanced level of protection from click fraud – ultimately improving ROI through better performance.

Through Burst’s partnership with Anchor Intelligence, web sites and ad networks utilizing adConductor™, Burst’s ad management and optimization platform, will also have enhanced insight into their own and affiliates’ traffic quality.

“Our partnership with Anchor Intelligence will contribute to Burst’s ad inventory optimization and traffic filtering programs and allow us to deliver even more value to our advertiser and publisher partners by enhancing our commitment to provide the highest quality traffic sources,” said Harry Klein, COO Burst Media. Burst joins the ranks of Ask.com, Technorati, LookSmart, Vivaki (Publicis Groupe), and several other industry leaders in partnering with Anchor Intelligence to protect advertisers and improve advertising performance.

“As advertising budgets continue to shift from traditional media to online, and vulnerabilities are increasingly exploited at the expense of advertisers, click fraud is and will continue to be a considerable challenge,” said Ken Miller, CEO of Anchor Intelligence. “It’s reassuring to see leading ad networks like Burst Media employing advanced measures to ensure the safety of their advertisers from fraudsters.”

Over the last fourteen years Burst Media has earned a reputation in the industry for unparalleled integrity and transparency. During this time, Burst has helped thousands of advertisers reach engaged audiences and web publishers manage and grow their business.

About Burst Media

An online media and technology company founded in 1995, Burst Media (www.burstmedia.com) is a leading provider of advertising representation, services and technology to independent Web Publishers. Burst Media enables advertisers to reach finely segmented, engaged consumers as they visit Burst’s extensive number of interest-based sub-channels. Through its Burst Network and Burst Direct units, the company represents one of the broadest and deepest offerings of interest-based websites online. Burst also markets its ad management platform, adConductor™, which empowers content websites, online ad networks, and web portals to manage the complete process of ad sales and service. Burst Media is headquartered in Burlington, Massachusetts, with offices throughout the United States and in London, UK. For more information, visit www.burstmedia.com or call 781.272.5544.

About Anchor Intelligence

Anchor Intelligence Inc., headquartered in Mountain View, CA, is the traffic quality solutions provider of choice among ad networks, search engines, and advertisers. Using Anchor Intelligence’s ClearMark, the industry’s first and only real-time traffic scoring system, industry players obtain the necessary intelligence to fight click and impression fraud, efficiently manage traffic sources, and capitalize on high quality clicks while maximizing advertiser ROI. For more information, visit: www.anchorintelligence.com.

Company nominated in the Email Marketing Tool category

MINNEAPOLIS – BlueHornet Networks, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Digital River, Inc. (NASDAQ: DRIV), and a leading provider of permission-based email marketing solutions, is one of three email service providers nominated for a ClickZ Marketing Excellence Award in the Email Marketing Tool category. The category is comprised of companies whose products or services help marketers optimize email marketing campaigns or integrate email marketing with other marketing channels.

Finalists were selected by ClickZ editorial staff. A winner will be chosen by a panel of industry practitioners and announced June 2, 2009. Finalists can be found at http://www.clickz.com/awards.

“BlueHornet has developed email marketing solutions that simplify the marketer’s ability to identify new revenue opportunities and execute targeted campaigns,” said Gerry Widmer, vice president of operations and client services for BlueHornet. “We are honored to be recognized among best-of-breed solutions by the editors of ClickZ.”

ClickZ.com, part of Incisive Media, is one of the industry’s resources for interactive marketing news, advice and stats. The ClickZ Marketing Excellence Awards recognize the technologies and companies that make a positive difference in the online marketing industry.

About Digital River, Inc.

Digital River, Inc., a leading provider of global e-commerce solutions, builds and manages online businesses for software and game publishers, consumer electronics manufacturers, distributors, online retailers and affiliates. Its multi-channel e-commerce solution, which supports both direct and indirect sales, is designed to help companies of all sizes maximize online revenues as well as reduce the costs and risks of running an e-commerce operation. The company’s comprehensive platform offers site development and hosting, order management, fraud management, export controls, tax management, physical and digital product fulfillment, multi-lingual customer service, advanced reporting and strategic marketing services.

Founded in 1994, Digital River is headquartered in Minneapolis with offices across the U.S. as well as Brazil, China, England, Germany, Ireland, Japan, Luxembourg and Taiwan. For more details about Digital River, visit the corporate Web site at www.digitalriver.com or call 952-253-1234.

Digital River is a registered trademark of Digital River, Inc. BlueHornet is a registered trademark of BlueHornet Networks, Inc. All other company and product names are trademarks, registrations or copyrights of their respective owners.

Publishers and Advertisers Reach Consensus on Critical Online Measurement

NEW YORK – To an Internet user, a click is a simple action. Accurately counting those clicks, however, is a complex operational task. The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) announced the release of its Click Measurement Guidelines, which establish parameters for the accurate buying and selling of cost-per-click advertising. The guidelines, agreed upon by key industry stakeholders, provide a strong framework for identifying and discarding invalid or fraudulent clicks, helping ensure that only legitimate clicks are counted.

The Click Measurement Guidelines:

* Define the technical life-cycle of a “click” and outline standard methodologies by which clicks should be measured and counted, including provisions for identifying invalid and/or fraudulent clicks.
* Establish standard terms that will help streamline the buying and selling of click-based media.
* Increase transparency and consistency in click measurements for media companies, ad-serving organizations, advertisers, and third-party click auditors.

“The fact that we’ve obtained agreement within the online industry on the precise definition and measurement of a click and a procedure for identifying and eliminating fraudulent clicks is a huge win for the industry,” said Joe Laszlo, research director of the IAB. “These guidelines help assure marketers that the clicks they are paying for are generated by real people with a real interest in the product or service being advertised.”

The guidelines are the latest addition to the IAB’s ongoing efforts to harmonize interactive measurement. They complement IAB guidelines for general ad impressions, digital video commercials and audience reach measurement.

“The ability to measure consumer interactions with ads has been one of the hallmarks of the interactive advertising industry,” said George Ivie, Executive Director and CEO of the Media Rating Council (MRC). “The IAB has taken a leadership role in bringing this important work on Click Measurement to fruition and marketers and agencies will benefit enormously from it.”

“The work of the IAB and member companies has produced an excellent document that is a solid first step in this process,” said Tom Cuthbert, President, Click Forensics. “We are proud to have been a part of the process every step of the way and will continue to support the efforts of the IAB and other organizations that work to improve traffic quality.”

To view the complete document, please go to www.iab.net/clickmeasurementguidelines.

About the IAB’s Click Measurement Working Group:

The Click Measurement Working Group includes representatives from 38 IAB member companies, including sellers, measurers, and auditors of online media. Initiated in late 2005, the working group, together with the Media Rating Council, has spent the last three years developing these important guidelines and achieving consensus around them.

About the IAB:

The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) is comprised of more than 375 leading media and technology companies who are responsible for selling 86% of online advertising in the United States. On behalf of its members, the IAB is dedicated to the growth of the interactive advertising marketplace, of interactive’s share of total marketing spend, and of its members’ share of total marketing spend. The IAB educates marketers, agencies, media companies and the wider business community about the value of interactive advertising. Working with its member companies, the IAB evaluates and recommends standards and practices and fields critical research on interactive advertising. Founded in 1996, the IAB is headquartered in New York City with a Public Policy office in Washington, D.C. For more information, please visit www.iab.net.

Leading Click Fraud Fighter Enhances Solutions to Optimize Ad Network and Search Campaigns in Real-time

AUSTIN, Texas – Click Forensics™, Inc., the industry leader in scoring, auditing and improving traffic quality for the online advertising community, announced the immediate availability of a newly-architected version of its Click Forensics traffic quality management platform that allows online ad networks, publishers and advertisers to identify traffic that’s more likely to convert into sales. Building on its market-leading click fraud detection solution, the Click Forensics platform gives customers a more effective way to target high-quality online traffic sources to improve campaign performance.

“Monitoring and processing billions of clicks across the industry’s top ad networks, online publishers, search engines and advertiser web sites means we have one of the best vantage points for identifying what does and doesn’t work in online advertising,” said Paul Pellman, CEO of Click Forensics. “Our new platform helps customers pinpoint and increase the flow of highly-convertible traffic in real-time, which ultimately improves the results of their online campaigns.”

“Not only can the new Click Forensics platform identify and block the worst-performing traffic and click fraud, it can also help us identify higher quality traffic that improves sales revenue performance for our clients,” said Josh Edis, Global Head of search ad network Searchworld. “This makes it easier for us to distinguish our ad network from others in the market by delivering only the best traffic quality possible. As a result, our ad distribution clients and supplier partners generate more business.”

The power of the Click Forensics traffic quality management solutions is derived from monitoring online media traffic across over 300 ad networks as well as billions of clicks from top search engines, leading publishers and advertiser web sites – providing the most complete and holistic view of search and online advertising traffic quality. Combining more than three years of industry online advertising data and patent-pending heuristics to measure and score traffic quality in real-time, the best and worst traffic sources are flagged so advertisers, publishers and ad networks can select only the kind of traffic they want in order to improve the overall performance of online campaigns. Some of the capabilities available in the newly-architected platform include:

* Click Forensics Site Score – sources of traffic are tagged with individual Click Forensics Site Scores that rank visitors based on their propensity to convert. This allows ad networks to more effectively filter and route traffic for highest monetization and provide the best ROI for online advertisers.
* Adaptive Intelligence – to accommodate varying traffic profiles among different ad networks, advertisers, and publishers, the new engine provides the capability to adjust rules and thresholds to produce traffic quality scores that better reflect propensity to convert for each specific client. For example, an ad network that caters to retailers in Asia might have very different traffic patterns than a B2B ad network in North America.
* Machine Learning – the traffic scoring engine also employs new machine learning capabilities that allow it to adapt and tune itself in real-time to detect new sources of good and bad traffic as they emerge. Filtering decisions can be made instantly based on traffic quality thresholds set by clients.
* Enhanced Anomaly Detection – more granular click anomaly detection features can distinguish new complex click types – machine or human – even from the same computer. This includes increasingly popular malicious Javascript programs that execute upon a page view or site visit. In addition, volume and spike anomalies can be more easily identified to protect from stealth attacks, such as those resulting from botnet activation.

For more information on the new Click Forensics platform, visit www.clickforensics.com.

About Click Forensics, Inc.

Click Forensics is the industry leader in scoring, auditing and improving traffic quality for the online advertising community. Click Forensics provides traffic quality management solutions for leading online advertisers, publishers, and ad networks including companies such as Yahoo!, eBay, Progressive Insurance, Experian, Nextag, Infospace, Turn, Traffic Engine, Vegas.com and many others. The company also publishes the Click Fraud Index®, the top independent source of industry click fraud data. Click Forensics is headquartered in Austin, Texas, and is privately held with funding from Sierra Ventures, Austin Ventures, Shasta Ventures, and Stanford University. More information on Click Forensics and its offerings is available at www.ClickForensics.com.

Click Fraud Index is a registered trademark of Click Forensics, Inc. Click Forensics is a trademark of Click Forensics, Inc. All other company and product names mentioned are used only for identification and may be trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies.

Largest Private PPC Network Opens the Web’s Premier Destination for Online Advertising
ad:tech San Francisco

SHERMAN OAKS, Calif. & SAN FRANCISCO – At ad:tech San Francisco, the world’s largest privately-held PPC search network, ABCSearch, an Internext Media Corp. company, announced the acquisition of Advertise.com. As of today, all ABCSearch solutions will be transitioned under the Advertise.com, Inc. brand. Advertise.com aims to provide marketers with a one-stop-shop for all of their digital marketing needs, while reaching a wider audience through premium traffic sources and an exclusive publisher network. Advertise.com will serve as a larger online advertising solution offering multiple integrated programs, including PPC, contextual targeting, and display ads.

This strategic business move will provide the online advertising community with a valuable new tool that maximizes their ad spend. Advertise.com is built on the foundation of ABCSearch’s established network of publishers and partners cultivated since 2001. For advertisers, this means exposure through more than 325 million daily searches, which equates to 10 billion impressions per month [1]. Publishers benefit from tested monetization tools and technology that enhances the user experience and maximizes conversions.

“I believe that online advertising needs a new approach,” said Daniel Yomtobian, founder and CEO of Advertise.com. According to Yomtobian, advertisers and publishers have so many choices—some work, while others definitely do not. “The current model does not provide advertisers enough ROI. We launched Advertise.com to provide advertisers and publishers a new value proposition—effective, affordable, and easy-to-use advertising campaigns all under one roof. We are committed to our motto: ‘online marketing made easy’.”

Advertise.com provides the most comprehensive array of services for both advertisers and publishers.

FOR ADVERTISERS:

Advertise.com provides a wide range of benefits, including:

* Alternative traffic channels that deliver lower costs per click
* Unique network transparency for easy optimization
* Geo-targeting for national and local campaigns
* Fast and easy management with real-time reporting
* Flexible bidding to get results
* Advanced fraud protection around-the-clock
* Customer support from industry experts

Advertise.com gives advertisers the power to boost online marketing efforts with both search and display ad campaigns. By accessing the Advertise.com network of exclusive search and content publishers, marketers take advantage of a solution that achieves their strategic goals while costing significantly less than other search-and-display providers. A search-and-display combination is a powerful one-two punch. Emerging industry research suggests this type of integrated effort boosts significantly not only brand awareness, but customer engagement and sales conversion as well.

FOR PUBLISHERS:

Publishers looking to monetize their unique monthly visitors are in a great position to generate ongoing revenue, but traditional advertiser/publisher models limit much of a publisher’s options with topics such as branding a CPC split. An Advertise.com partnership offers significant benefits, including:

* Competitive revenue sharing for higher profits
* Reliable demand from search and display advertisers
* Contextual banner and in-page ad technology
* Easy-to-implement search tools
* Special options for highly ranked sites
* Daily revenue reports
* Prompt payments

Advertise.com provides publishers with a competitive revenue-sharing structure helping them turn traffic into profits with some of the highest revenues of any search-and-display advertising platform. Advertisers’ feeds are optimized to ensure neither their or a publisher’s brands are watered down with irrelevant matches. For quality, Advertise.com processes all incoming traffic for quality and requires the majority of its traffic to come from the United States, Canada, and Western Europe, eliminating many sources of click fraud and other PPC problems.

“We’re excited to re-introduce value in the online advertising industry with the launch of Advertise.com,” continued Yomtobian. “This is a sea-change in the way brands generate paid visibility on the web, and how ad publishers are compensated for their work in creating an audience. As we launch today, we’re looking forward to bringing even more innovative services to the industry through Advertise.com.”

ABOUT ADVERTISE.COM

Advertise.com is a premier platform for search and display marketing that enables advertisers to reach a wider audience through our exclusive network of search engines and publisher properties. We have been leading the charge in online advertising since 2001, connecting thousands of advertisers with millions of consumers every day – now delivering more than 10 billion ad impressions each month. [1]

Offering a range of high-quality pay-per-click advertising, contextual targeting, and banner ad opportunities, Advertise.com is focused on providing the most effective, most affordable, and easiest-to-use search-and-display advertising platform in the industry.

[1] Advertise.com Metrics Impression Count, March 2009

New Forms of Scripted Attacks on the Rise – The “Zero-iframe” Clicker
ad:tech San Francisco

AUSTIN, Texas – Click Forensics™, Inc. released industry pay-per-click (PPC) fraud figures for the first quarter 2009 from the search advertising industry’s leading independent click fraud reporting service – the Click Fraud Index® (www.ClickFraudIndex.com). Now in its fourth year, the Click Fraud Index provides statistically significant industry PPC data collected from online advertising campaigns for both large and small advertisers across all leading search engines. Traffic across more than 300 ad networks is also reflected in the data. Key findings for Q1 2009 include:

* The overall industry average click fraud rate was 13.8 percent for Q1 2009. That’s down from 17.1 percent reported for Q4 2008 and from the 16.3 percent rate reported for Q1 2008.
* Click fraud traffic from malicious scripted programs increased in Q1 2009. Unlike botnets or malware, these new threats exist as simple Javascript programs that execute upon a page view or site visit. Ad networks were found to be especially vulnerable to these attacks during the quarter.
* In Q1 2009, the greatest percentage of click fraud originating from countries outside the U.S. came from Canada, United Kingdom and Germany.

“It appears that the drop in keyword Cost Per Clicks (CPCs) and the progress Yahoo! and Google made blocking click fraud from botnet sources contributed to the decline in the overall click fraud rate this quarter,” said Tom Cuthbert, president of Click Forensics. “However, we also saw an increase in scripted attacks aimed at ad networks, which are historically more vulnerable to such threats. Advertisers should pay close attention to traffic from these sources over the next year.”

The data also indicated that click fraud schemes are increasingly complex, sophisticated, and more difficult to detect. One new type of fraud discovered this quarter was perpetrated by malicious scripts that execute when a visitor views a web page disguised as relevant content or search results. The script initiates “Zero-iframe” or off-screen clicks that route the visitor session through an alias referrer website, and on to unsuspecting advertisers who pay for the phantom click. All this occurs transparently to the offending site’s visitor; they never see the ad or visit the advertiser, and their computer is not infected with any type of malware or botnet.

The Click Fraud Index publishes data collected from the industry’s first independent third-party click fraud detection service dedicated to helping companies more accurately monitor their online advertising campaigns for pay-per-click fraud. The service is unique in that it monitors online campaigns for click fraud by correlating advertising campaign data collected from search providers, over 300 ad networks and the advertisers’ own web sites – providing the industry’s most accurate view of click fraud to date.

About Click Forensics, Inc.

Click Forensics is the industry leader in scoring, auditing and improving traffic quality for the online advertising community. Click Forensics provides traffic quality management solutions for leading online advertisers, publishers, and ad networks including companies such as Yahoo!, eBay, Progressive Insurance, Experian, Nextag, Infospace, Turn, Traffic Engine, Vegas.com and many others. The company also publishes the Click Fraud Index®, the top independent source of industry click fraud data. Click Forensics is headquartered in Austin, Texas, and is privately held with funding from Sierra Ventures, Austin Ventures, Shasta Ventures, and Stanford University. More information on Click Forensics and its offerings is available at www.ClickForensics.com.

Click Fraud Index is a registered trademark of Click Forensics, Inc. Click Forensics is a trademark of Click Forensics, Inc. All other company and product names mentioned are used only for identification and may be trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies.

Defines Parameters for Click Measurement, Provides a Unified Industry Response to the Problem of Fraudulent Clicks

NEW YORK – The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) announced the release of Click Measurement Guidelines, a document that will establish parameters for the accurate buying and selling of cost-per-click advertising, an important and growing category of interactive advertising. Marketers will now have a standard for consistently and reliably measuring their performance-based marketing efforts. The guidelines also provide a strong framework for filtering fraudulent clicks, giving buyers and sellers confidence that only legitimate clicks are being counted.

The Click Measurement Guidelines will:

* Provide a detailed definition of a “click” and outline standard methodologies by which clicks should be measured and counted, including the identification of invalid and/or fraudulent clicks.
* Define standard terms that will help streamline the buying and selling of click-based media.
* Increase transparency and consistency in click measurements for media companies, ad-serving organizations, advertisers, and third-party click auditors.

“These guidelines demonstrate our continued commitment to being the most accountable advertising medium and providing marketers with the highest possible level of transparency,” said Sherrill Mane, Senior Vice President, Industry Services of the IAB. “It is critical that the advertising industry agree upon the precise definition and measurement of a click and establish procedures for weeding out fraudulent clicks. The IAB is proud to have organized our members around this effort.”

The guidelines are the latest addition to the IAB’s ongoing work to harmonize interactive measurement. They complement IAB guidelines for general ad impressions, digital video commercials and audience reach measurement.

“I applaud the IAB for taking a leadership role in bringing the Click Measurement Guidelines to fruition,” said George Ivie, Executive Director and CEO, of the Media Rating Council (MRC). “The interactive industry has consistently met the marketplace need for increased reliability in measurement, and this is yet another example of how the IAB has mobilized its members on behalf of both agencies and marketers.”

“Helping the interactive industry define a click and the standard for measuring one has been an extraordinary effort on the part of the IAB and its members,” said Shuman Ghosemajumder, Business Product Manager for Trust & Safety, Google, and a leading member of the IAB’s Click Measurement Working Group. “It is an important step that continues to reinforce interactive media’s role as the most accountable and measurable form of advertising.”

“IAB’s guidelines will provide users, advertisers and partners with further confidence that the industry, including Yahoo!, is taking click fraud issues seriously,” said Reggie Davis, VP of Network Quality at Yahoo! “Yahoo! worked on the IAB’s Click Measurement Working Group to develop these guidelines for identifying and filtering potential invalid or fraudulent clicks as part of its commitment to a transparent process for the measurement of valid clicks.”

Members of the industry—advertising agencies, advertisers, online publishers and technology vendors—are encouraged to read the proposed guidelines and submit comments on the IAB site at: www.iab.net/clickmeasurementguidelines. After the comment period closes on Friday March 27, 2009, the feedback will be reviewed and the guidelines will be finalized and released.

About the IAB’s Click Measurement Working Group:

The Click Measurement Working Group includes representatives from 38 IAB member companies, including sellers, measurers, and auditors of online media. Initiated in late 2005, the working group, together with the Media Rating Council, has spent the last three years developing these important guidelines and achieving consensus around them.

About the IAB:

The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) is comprised of more than 400 leading media and technology companies who are responsible for selling 86% of online advertising in the United States. On behalf of its members, the IAB is dedicated to the growth of the interactive advertising marketplace, of interactive’s share of total marketing spend, and of its members’ share of total marketing spend. The IAB educates marketers, agencies, media companies and the wider business community about the value of interactive advertising. Working with its member companies, the IAB evaluates and recommends standards and practices and fields critical research on interactive advertising. Founded in 1996, the IAB is headquartered in New York City with a Public Policy office in Washington, D.C. For more information, please visit www.iab.net.