zomg. great idea!

[ebtb.livejournal.com]

Here are my customers...

If it weren't for the completely paranoid/insane/conspiracy-theorist customers, I would hate supporting security software.

Comments

[bassgirl.livejournal.com]

Ha. Awesome story.

[whitewolf3399.livejournal.com]

Gotta love it...

Just keep repeating to yourself "These idiots pay my salary" over and over. Eventually you might even believe it ;)

[jecook]

::headdesk::

[maureenlycaon.livejournal.com]

*snigger*

Well, to be fair . . . some of those folks might have honestly been curious about what the hell was going on with an ad offering to infest your PC. I know if I saw that ad while in my Linux partition, I might be tempted to satisfy that curiosity.

[mariasama16.livejournal.com]

Ah, but you'd be doing it on your Linux partition. The majority of those clicks, 98%, were on Windows machines. It does sound like a few people were on Macs/Linux and clicked but that 98% proves his theory.

[rorted.livejournal.com]

Does anything about the following stats strike you as odd?

People will click on anything.

That was made clear by the 409 people who clicked on an ad that offers infection for those with virus-free PCs.

...

This is the breakdown for the browsers that were used in those 409 clicks:

IE 5.5: 1 visitor
IE 6.0: 286
IE 7.0: 48
Safari 2.0: 1
Opera 9.01: 1
Opera 9.10: 1
Firefox 1.0: 7
Firefox 1.5.0.7: 9
Firefox 1.5.0.8: 2
Firefox 1.5.0.9: 3
Firefox 2.0: 3
Firefox 2.0.0.1: 6
Firefox 2.0.0.2: 1
Firefox 2.0.0.3: 21
SeaMonkey 1.1: 2
AdsBot-Google: 24

Total: 416

How can you make 409 clicks with 416 different browsers?

Also I hope they're not including the "AdsBot-Google" user-agent string in their 409 clicks statistic ... most bots I know aren't people and are incapable of clicking anything.

[wherdafux-d-cat.livejournal.com]

Keep reading. In the line immediately below 'Total: 416' the article continues:

Stevens found a discrepancy of seven hits recorded by his logs, but not reported by Google. He believes those seven click-throughs might have come from bots that Google filtered out.

[rorted.livejournal.com]

Durr, now those figures make sense - and as suspected they are counting bots as people and their hits as clicks.

[amynnah.livejournal.com]

Hey... I think those are my users!