Brand Hijacking Occurs Often On The Web
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The World Wide Web can be a “Wild West” of sorts, and for big corporations, they have to take measures to ensure that their brands don’t get trashed online. Brandjacking is happening often, through means as diverse as phishing and domain squatting. Don’t forget the insidious activity known as click fraud.
MarkMonitor found major brands suffered, on average, 286,000 examples of cybersquatting during over the four-week long survey, far and away the most common abuse detected.
Clickfraud — or siphoning off consumers via fake pay-per-click ads — was identified 50,743 times, while e-commerce fraud occurred 21,093 times and kiting 11,015. These figures represent the four-week average for each brand.
Frederick Felman, MarkMonitor’s chief marketing officer, said in an interview that cybersquatting is a starting point for other forms of abuse, including search marketing tricks designed to pull traffic away from reputable Web sites.
Of course the biggest targets for these types of attacks are media and internet companies, but realistically, they can and do happen to all of us. The problem is insidious in that it’s tough to stop, and it’s occuring on a huge scale. The scammers have been able to scale their efforts, sometime with more success than those trying to fight them.
Have you ever faced brandjacking?
Resource: Reuters
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2 Responses to “Brand Hijacking Occurs Often On The Web”
My client is currently is suffering from clickfraud brandjacking and the lack of assistance from google is disgusting - they are making money from this so they do not care. Long live the day that google ceases to be the main search engine in the UK - they got where they are by people power, so let’s hope that clickfraud gets so bad that people turn to the better search engines for help. Considering google is supposed to be based on trust and fighting against bad practices, their attitude towards brandjacking is shameful and they hide behind their corporate walls. Hope they remember that the higher they get, the harder they will fall!
By steve neale on May 7, 2007
Thanks for the comment, Steve. It seems like everyone is uncomfortable with the power of Google these days.
By Darren McLaughlin on May 8, 2007