MUMBAI: The world's most valuable media firm Google will pay $90 million to settle a click fraud case. Click fraud refers to people clicking on ads many times on search engines without actually going to the advertiser's website.

When advertisers buy ads through the networks run by search and Internet companies like Google, they pay them based on the number of times their ads are clicked on. Click fraud occurs when individuals or machines generate clicks on ads that don’t convert into any legitimate traffic to advertiser web sites.

This writer remembers a story that appeared over a year ago that stated that lots of school, college students and housewives in India make money by simply clicking on ads. While this is boring it does involve less brainwork and effort.

Reports state that Google and Yahoo could all do a better job in terms of transparency and providing a more robust data set to perform analytics. The solution going forward is going to be an industry solution, with transparency in the form of a third party or several third parties to help advertisers with auditing.

Ad-hosting sites that get a cut of Google’s revenue also are believed to use software and cheap labour to increase the number of clicks and thus make advertisers pay more. Rival advertisers could also be partly responsible for the fraud the extent of which is still to be fully determined.