On the security of pay-per-click and other Web advertising schemes
WWW '99 Proceedings of the eighth international conference on World Wide Web
HotBots'07 Proceedings of the first conference on First Workshop on Hot Topics in Understanding Botnets
Privacy diffusion on the web: a longitudinal perspective
Proceedings of the 18th international conference on World wide web
Putting out a HIT: crowdsourcing malware installs
WOOT'11 Proceedings of the 5th USENIX conference on Offensive technologies
Dirty jobs: the role of freelance labor in web service abuse
SEC'11 Proceedings of the 20th USENIX conference on Security
Measuring and fingerprinting click-spam in ad networks
Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM 2012 conference on Applications, technologies, architectures, and protocols for computer communication
Measuring and fingerprinting click-spam in ad networks
ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review - Special october issue SIGCOMM '12
Dissecting ghost clicks: ad fraud via misdirected human clicks
Proceedings of the 28th Annual Computer Security Applications Conference
ViceROI: catching click-spam in search ad networks
Proceedings of the 2013 ACM SIGSAC conference on Computer & communications security
Impression fraud in online advertising via pay-per-view networks
SEC'13 Proceedings of the 22nd USENIX conference on Security
DECAF: detecting and characterizing ad fraud in mobile apps
NSDI'14 Proceedings of the 11th USENIX Conference on Networked Systems Design and Implementation
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Internet advertising has been a highly profitable means by which companies and organizations can pay to attract visitors to their Web sites. Over time, satisfying the demand for this service has evolved into a market of "click traffic" providers that use various models to direct visitors to customer sites. Well-known premium providers like Google AdWords use pay-per-click auctions, for instance, while a variety of bargain providers offer click traffic in bulk. In this paper, we evaluate the quality of purchased click traffic from a range of such traffic providers. Using multiple instances of a custom Web site, we purchase click traffic to our sites from nine providers. In each case, we characterize click traffic directed to the sites using a variety of metrics, including timing properties, access patterns on the site, network properties of the hosts accessing the site, correlation with blacklists, etc. We find that providers differ substantially, and that these characteristics correlate with click quality: the traffic you get is the traffic you pay for.