Google will have to pay claimants $4.50 for every $1,000 of
advertising they booked with the company. Judge Joe Griffin of
Miller County Circuit Court described the settlement as "fair,
reasonable and adequate".
Not every company has agreed to the terms of the settlement, but
Google told the Associated Press newswire that 19 of its 20 biggest
advertisers involved in the case had agreed.
The case began in January 2005 when Lane's Gifts and
Collectables took Google to task over its advertising system. It
turned into a class action suit and 70 companies joined the
case.
Click fraud occurs when an automated programme clicks on a
company's adverts, making it look as though a person has clicked
from Google to an advertiser's page. Because the advertiser pays
for each individual drawn by its ad on Google pages, click fraud
can cost advertisers significant sums of money.
The fraud most often takes place when a firm's competitors set
up systems to click on its ads to run down its advertising budget.
It can even happen if a website publisher clicks on the ad to boost
its own revenue.
Google's opponents in the suit claimed compensation because they
said that Google did not do enough to prevent click fraud taking
place.
Google's decision to settle was not unique: Yahoo! settled a
similar case in California earlier this year.
The settlement involves credits for more Google advertising for
the claimants, who had lobbied for any settlement to be paid in
cash.
Google this week announced revisions to its systems that it
hopes will make click fraud less common. It says its system allows
users to see how many of the clicks through to its site Google
believes to be fake. Some industry estimates are reported to put
the proportion of clicks that are fake as high as 15%.
