[zach]

Well this has been happening to a lot of people recently, and so I figured I would write about this to inform Domain Social members.


Fabulous and Click Fraud

Fabulous has very high payouts for certain names, particularly gambling names. With some portfolios bringing in around US$1,000 per month, the stakes are high. Fabulous tries as hard as it can to protect the value of its traffic - Fabulous only works because 1. it is one of the few parking partners which accepts gambling names and 2. its traffic converts into real gamblers who make real deposits.

If you click on your own ads, or even if a freind clicks to 'just help you out', you are commiting click fraud. This is tollerated by non of the parking partners, nor is it tollerated by Pay Per Click companies in general (such as Google Adsense or Yahoo Publisher Network). Like most parking partners, Fabulous WILL cancel your if they catch you commiting click fraud.

It is not always easy to detect click fraud. However, Fabulous is able to detect odd traffic paterns. This includes, an unusual distribution of visits (either by time, ip block, or geographic location), artifical website promotion (such as advertising on adsense or free directories), and refering sites.


Action taken by Fabulous

If Fabulous suspects that you may be commiting click Fraud they will send you an email asking you to stop. If you don't, the same email will be sent again. Finally, on the third time, you will get banned.

Here is a sample warning email:

Hi <name on account>,

Your account has been flagged in our fraud report recently. I have taken a further look and noticed that you have clicked on some of the links appearing on your domains.

I would like to remind you that this is against our Terms and Conditions and if it continues it could result in the suspension of your account. You are free to view your domains, however, please don't click on the links.

This is just a friendly note, as I would not like to see your account suspended over something like this.

If you have any questions or concerns, please let me know.

Kind regards,


<account rep's name>
Senior Account Representative
Fabulous.com

Here is a sample ban email:

Hi <name on account>,

Thank you for using Fabulous.com to monetize your domain name traffic.

We continue to monitor the traffic from all domain name owners to ensure we only send the highest quality traffic to our advertisers.

Your domain names unfortunately do not meet our standards and therefore you will need to find another program to monetize the traffic being generated from your domain names. The main reason for this is due to the abnormal traffic patterns we noticed on your domains.

Should you have any questions or concerns please do not hesitate to ask.

Kind regards,


<Senior account rep's name>
Senior Account Representative
Fabulous.com

Hope that this answers some questions. If you would like to know something else specific to Fabulous, feel free to contact me (and I will contact them for you) or you can ask others here.

Zach

[triumph]

Comitting click fraud with any advertising medium is a very short-sighted strategy. I know people think it is fool-proof and they can be the one to get away with it, but there is so much money to make out there without click-fraud it is dumb to throw it away for a few dollars now that might have been thousands tomorrow.

[vicki2]

I know any number of people who tried it, either innocently or not, and have gotten caught. For me, it just isn't an option I want to even think about!

[Plumley]

Good article and answered my question about how click fraud is determined. Unfortunately, I've heard of folks getting accounts cancelled when they weren't fraudulent. I don't know how common that is but probably not enough to worry the companies involved.

[Slashmire]

Well it does make sense, and I'm sure that plenty of these people do get away with it; it's nice to see that actions are being taken.