a click or not a click? what's your "impression"?

There's no doubt the online advertising market is very well increasing as more advertisers shift to the internet to sell and promote their products and services. Marketers are rebelling against old media as more and more listeners, viewers and readers connect to the internet, advertisers are obviously following the suit.

But with these comes issues, some advertisers and web sites are having some troubles because they can't agree on what they should be counting. Most debates point to "clicks" on an ad. Advertisers argue that they should be billed only for clicks that bring customers to their Web sites to shop around. They don't want to pay for clicks made by accident or by, say, malicious competitors trying to make them exhaust their marketing budget. They also worry about unscrupulous Web site operators who click on the ads on their own sites - sometimes employing computer "bots" to do the job - so they can put more money in their pockets. But sellers of web advertising say it's not easy to distinguish the good clicks from the bad.

One of Google's business product manager wrote in a recent blog that their servers can accurately count clicks on ads, but the system cannot know what the intent of the clicking user was when they made that click. True. Thats why the big names like Google and Yahoo are said to be working on new technologies to sniff out phony clicks. I guess they should really work on this and make some kind of standard on measuring w/c clicks are counted and not. Because if you scare away the advertisers, publishers/web site owners who run these ads will definitely be affected in the end.