Jon’s In Waikiki (AKA The Waikiki Marketer)

As most of you know, Hawaii suffered a 6.7 earthquake, which did some damage and knocked out power here on Oahu for a day or two, depending on where you live. My wife and I were awoken by the first tremor, though we really didn’t know what happened. We were just vaguely aware of our lanai door shaking pretty hard and a big rumbling.

Along with the electricity, we lost Internet access for a day. The utter lack of food (or at least being able to cook any), lights, television, etc was sobering, to say the least. We’ve gone through power outages before, but this one took out the entire island. This complete dependence on the power plants almost scares me now.

Luckily it didn’t affect me too much professionally, even if I lacked any way to get onto the Internet for some time. Emails were sent out, people were understanding and life returned to normal.

Part of my normal life is the issue of click fraud, which must be dealt with constantly. It was therefore interesting that Click Fraud Index had just published their study saying that the click fraud rate had declined this quarter; the exact percentages were 12.8% down to 11.9%. Somehow I’m not convinced.

Considering the lack of progress I’ve seen and been aware of in this realm, I’m skeptical that Google, Yahoo & MSN have made in-roads. The drop could be a result from a drop in ad campaigns by people who have been plagued by click fraud. By dropping out, from complete frustration and profit losses, that would make the study very believable. At least for me.

I don’t see any exclamations of victory on any search engine forums. If anything has helped, it has been 3rd party software developed to catch fraudulent clicks. For some reason they can catch these frauds, while Google, who has much more data to work with, can’t. Does that make sense to anyone?

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