26th
Arbitrage, and why greed and the likes of Marchex et al killed it.
I have a friend who works in Internet networks, data streams and all that malarkey. Very successful guy, works with all the big banks and search engines etc. His business tests the infrastructure and network capacity for the likes of HSBC, Ebay, Yahoo, Google… You can imagine the list. Recently he was showing me some of his hardware wizardry that has the ability to open millions of concurrent connections to web sites, perform any number of random actions on the site and do so from any number of spoofed / random IP addresses. In short they can send millions of fake visitors to your site and act like real visitors. They will do anything and mirror real user behavior identically except, of course, go on to actually “buy” something. Impossible to detect and impossible to stop. The likes of HSBC and Yahoo employ this guy to test their networks ability to cope with data flooding and denial of service attacks. We discussed what effect something like this bit of kit and his company could do to the PPC market.. [Naivety alarm going off yet? :) ]. He was amazed that PPC even still existed and was very confident he would be able to fool even the best of fraud filters. I met him actually on the train whilst I was enroute to see another friend of mine who works at Miva. Mentioning the conversation I just had on the train to the Miva folk and how I was [wink] going to use it to generate some substantial revenue noticeably chilled the room by at least a degree or two. “Oh, please dont do that..” i think went the reply.