多数手机广告点击一钱不值

    如果说要弄清常规网络广告投放效果都颇为困难，那么想搞清手机广告的效果更是难上加难，特别是目前报道称大量广告点击都是无效的情况下。

    Trademob是一家德国的移动营销公司。近期，这家公司在一项研究中发现，手机广告点击中有40%要么纯属偶然行为（也许是烟头碰上的？），要么就是欺诈点击。而且，该公司还称，欺诈点击目前明显增多。今年年初，欺诈点击占手机广告总点击数的10%。而据Trademob向科技博客GigaOM独家公布的研究称，这个数字现在已经上升到了18%。GigaOM表示，Trademob“通过让客户意识到手机广告无效点击的存在而大赚其钱”，因为它会向手机广告平台兜售研究成果，而后者就会采用追踪工具过滤掉无效点击。不管这些数字精确与否，这类问题还是能部分解释这样一个事实，即尽管移动互联网的使用率不断上升，但要从手机广告中赚钱实在是难于登天。部分分析人士认为，这种情况正是Facebook自IPO以来股价一直萎靡不振的根本原因。而Facebook自己也承认了这一问题。本来在台式机上呈现广告就够有难度的了，当可供亮相的地盘缩小后（屏幕变小），难度只会进一步加大。

    不过，随着人们越来越多地用上了移动设备，广告也将如影随形，而互联网广告带来的问题，如欺诈点击，也会随之而来。Trademob称，有些欺诈点击来自应用的开发者，他们用自己的服务器生成这类点击。而另一种和互联网上类似的手法是，布设僵尸网络，目的是让点击表面上看起来似乎是从不同的IP地址而来的，这样就能让它们更难被人发现。而Trademob当然声称，自己的服务能彻底根除这种行为。

    不过，先抛开无效点击不论，向移动设备进军这一点已够让广告销售平台商们伤脑筋了。曾担任互联网股票分析师、目前在风投公司凯鹏华盈（Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers）担任风险投资家的玛丽•米克在五月的一场报告会上称，互联网广告的平均千人成本（CPM）是3.5美元，是手机广告CPM（0.75美元）的五倍。

    译者：清远

    If figuring out regular Internet advertising is hard, figuring out mobile advertising is even harder -- especially given that a huge proportion of ad clicks are reportedly worthless.

    A study by Trademob, a German mobile-marketing company, found that 40% of all mobile clicks are either accidents (butt clicks, perhaps?) or fraud. And mobile-ad click fraud is apparently growing fast, the company says. At the start of the year, fraud accounted for 10% of mobile-ad clicks. Now it accounts for 18%, according to the study, which Trademob shared exclusively with GigaOM. That site notes that Trademob "stands to gain by the awareness of useless mobile clicks" since the mobile-ad platform it peddles includes tracking tools for filtering out worthless results.

    Still, whether the numbers are precisely accurate or not, such problems account in part for the fact that despite the growth in mobile Internet access, making money from mobile ads has proved extremely difficult. Some analysts cite this as a big reason for the weakness of Facebook's (FB) stock price since its IPO. Facebook itself has acknowledged the problem. Presenting ads is hard enough on a desktop computer -- it only gets harder when the real estate shrinks.

    But as people increasingly take to mobile devices, the ads are following them -- along with the problems that Internet ads present, such as click fraud. Some of the fraud comes from app developers who generate false clicks from their servers, Trademob says. Another method, similar to what happens on the Internet, is to deploy bot networks -- this method serves the purpose of making clicks appear to be coming from different IP addresses, thus making them harder to detect. Trademob, of course, claims that its service can root them out.

    Worthless clicks aside, though, the migration to mobile is presenting a major problem for ad sellers. During a presentation in May, former Internet-stock analyst Mary Meeker, now a venture capitalist with Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, noted that the average CPM (cost per thousand ad-viewers) for Internet ads, at $3.50, is five times higher than the average CPM for mobile ads -- 75 cents.