Online advertising is based on two basic premises, the first being that a website will attract a certain amount of people to view the advertisement, and the second being that the people viewing the advertisement will click on the ad. There are some other minutea involved, but these are the basic premises of online advertising, and these two factors are used in determining the worth of advertising on a given site.
When someone goes to a site and clicks on an advertisement, that’s called a click-through. Monthly click-throughs are commonly used to determine whether an online advertising campaign is working. Naturally, this is because people see an online advertisement, and say “hey, I really could use: a bigger penis/some viagra/a free iPod” – and these people click on the ad because they want what it’s promoting.
If people don’t actually want to click on the advertisement, and click on it by mistake, they aren’t going to make a purchase. Everyone has done this; clicked on an advertisement for something by mistake, and immediately closed the window. This is called an accidental click-through, and typically has a 0% conversion rate for the (adveritsing) company getting the click. In other words, the advertiser sees the potential “customer” visiting their site, and thinks the ad-campaign is working – but in reality that person was never a potential customer, because they landed on the site accidentally…they never actually wanted to click the ad.
Scamtastic websites make use of the accidental click through by placing advertisers links impossibly close to other links on the site, or even on top of existing clickable icons. This is one of the oldest scams in the book to make a worthless advertising campaign appear like it’s producing clicks. Ultimately, when the client says they’re not converting the clicks to sales, the scammers blame the client’s sales page, or their product write ups, or whatever.
RxMuscle takes advantage of the accidental click-through to inflate the value of advertising on their site, by placing links to their clients over existing buttons on their media player.
So, if you’re watching a video of Dave Palumbo interviewing some black dude with gyno, and you try to pause the video (or stop it, or fast forward it, or whatever), you will accidentally click on the VPX Sports banner (which has purposely been placed over some of the media controls), and go to their homepage. Check it out:
[EliteFitness.com does this quite a bit, and their scam is twofold, because they immediately offer you "consulting" to help you redesign your sales page, at a tremendous cost. ]
http://www.anthonyroberts.info/2011/rxmuscle-more-advertising-fraud/
