China and India are fertile ground for AdSense and AdWords

I've had some interesting reaction to yesterday's posting about Are clicks from China and India automatically invalid? where I questioned Chitika's statement that they remove clicks from places like China and India. One of the readers of this blog left a comment about some email they received from Chitika about this, which includes this quote:

The problem is that, at this time, we dont have merchants who are willing to accept leads from India, China and Asia in general.

They then go on to indicate that they'd love to expand in Asia when they have the chance. And they should, but in the meantime they should really reword that question in their FAQ to remove the reference about invalid clicks from places such as China and India.

An interesting discussion was generated by this over in the Digital Point AdSense forum. The question posed was whether it would make sense to ban all AdSense publishers from Asia as one way to fix the click fraud problem. You can see my answer there, but let me expand on it here as well.

In short, banning Asians from AdSense would not solve the click fraud problem. Why? Because it's not the publishers who are the problem, it's the fraud artists. There are many legitimate publishers in Asia. Why should they suffer because many (but certainly not all) fraudsters live there? Not only would that be unfair, but it would also prevent Google from tapping into a growing market. In an article in today's Globe and Mail, columnist Geoffrey York mentions a study by Credit Suisse First Boston that 17% of Chinese households today have annual income over $5,000 but that number is expected to increase to 90% within the next decade. China and India are both ripe markets for advertisers, and Google would be foolish to avoid them (and they don't).

As I argued in the Digital Point forum posting, advertisers already have a tool at their disposal to help them combat click fraud. It's the geotargeting feature of AdWords, which lets advertisers choose the target countries and/or languages for displaying an ad campaign. If the advertisers have problems with click fraud from certain countries, they can always either avoid advertising in those countries or else run different (presumably cheaper) campaigns aimed specifically at those countries. A “click fraud discount” if you will. Over time, natural market forces will probably iron many of these issues out.

In any case, it would be wrong to assume that all click fraud occurs because of people outside of North America or Europe. Banning Asian AdSense publishers wouldn't fix the click fraud problem.

(For those who are wondering, I'll be continuing my AdSense case study next week.)

Eric Giguere is the author of Make Easy Money with Google, a real (printed!) introductory AdSense book for non-technical people, available at all fine bookstores. Be sure to download the free sample chapter for more information about the book.

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