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Google Trends, Clickbots, and Click Farms, Oh My!

I was playing with Google Trends today. First I tried to do a comparison of phrases like: msn adcenter, adsense, ypn, microsoft search, adwords, yahoo search, and overture. Yahoo! publisher network, yahoo publisher network, and microsoft adcenter did not generate enough search volume to graph out. Not surprising, when I tried to compare msn adcenter and ypn with adsense, the graphs for msn adcenter and ypn appear flat and near the zero mark. The search volume for adsense was just too high and out of scale with the other two ad networks.

The graph of adwords vs adsense worked out much better. You can see that the search volume for adwords was slightly higher than for adsense until about April 2005. Search volume for both programs are still growing, but adsense is definitely pulling away from adwords. Does this mean Adsense supply will exceed Adwords demand? Only time will tell.

adsense    adwords

Now, what I find interesting is the search by regions. Five out of the top six countries are on the list of countries with high fraudulent activities. You can also see from the chart that the adsense to adwords search ratio is about 5x for Malaysia and Indonesia. On the other hand, the ratio for the US is about even. I would not be surprised if the same people who engaged in fraudulent credit card activities are now targeting Adsense via clickbots and click farms. I'm not saying all publishers in those countries are doing this. I'm sure most are legit. I'm also sure there's a lot of scammers in the US are well. The chart below doesn't prove anything, but I find it very interesting.

  Top Regions     adsense    adwords  
1. Malaysia
 
2. Indonesia
 
3. India
 
4. Singapore
 
5. Philippines
 
6. Romania
 
7. Canada
 
8. New Zealand
 
9. United Kingdom
 
10. United States
 

BTW, Google's top regions data represent searches for adwords/adsense vs total searches for that region. It does not mean the regions at the top of the list search for adsense more than the US. It just means people in those regions had a higher propensity to search for adsense on a relative basis (more info about this here).

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2 Responses to Google Trends, Clickbots, and Click Farms, Oh My!

  1. hypertokyo says:

    As a web publisher from Indonesia please allow me to defend myself: we make websites for consumption by the US and European market; this means that adsense is a good source of income. However, given our small advertising budgets vis-a-vis corporations based on those markets, we need to rely on organic search results. It is not realistic for us to buy adwords effectively.
    Thanks for not painting all Malaysians and Indonesians as scammers!

  2. tron says:

    Can u pls tell me what is so interesting about that country table??

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