专四专八考试

【单选题】Internet advertising is booming. The industry has gone from $ 9.6 billion in revenue in 2001 to $ 27 billion this year, according to Piper J affray, an investment bank.And it is still early days. The internet accounts for only 5% of total spending on advertising, but that figure is expected to reach at least 20% in the next few years. The single largest category within this flourishing industry, accounting for nearly half of all spending, is "pay-per-click’ advertising, which is used by firms both large and small to promote their wares.
It works like this.Advertisers bid on keywords that they believe potential customers will be interested in. This enables Internet firms such as Google, the market leader, and Yahoo!, its smaller rival, to display advertisements alongside the results of Internet searches. Somebody searching for a particular type of wine, for example, might see advertisements from wine merchants. Google, Yahoo! and other firms also place ads on affiliates’ websites--so wine merchants’ advertisements might also appear on a wine-appreciation site. The advertiser pays only when a consumer clicks on an ad; the owner of the website where the ad was displayed then receives a small commission.
The benefits of the pay-per-click approach over traditional advertising are obvious. Since advertisers pay only to reach the small subset who actually respond to an advertisement, the quality of the leads generated is very high, and advertisers are prepared to pay accordingly. The price per click varies from $ 0.10 to as much as $ 30, depending on the keyword, though the average is around $ 0.50.
But as pay-per-click advertising has grown into a huge industry, concern has mounted over so-called "click fraud"--bogus clicks that do not come from genuinely interested customers. It takes two main forms. If you click repeatedly on the advertisements on your own website, or get other people or machines to do so on your behalf, you can generate a stream of bogus commissions.Click fraud can also be used by one company against another: clicking on a rival firm’s advertisements can saddle it with a huge bill.Bogus clicks are thought to account for around 10% of all click traffic, though nobody knows for sure.
Bill Gross, the entrepreneur who pioneered the pay-per-click model back in 1998, was aware of the problem even then. He installed a three-layered defence system: a filter to weed out clicks from known fraudsters at the outset, statisticians and software to spot suspicious click patterns, and co-operation with advertisers to enable them to analyse the leads generated and sound the alarm if necessary.
But generally the industry adopted a rather cavalier attitude to click frauD、Eric Schmidt, the boss of Google, caused uproar a few months ago when he seemed to suggest that the "perfect economic solution" to click fraud was to "let it happen". He was responding to a theoretical question during a debate at Stanford University, but his response reinforced the perception that Google had higher priorities than addressing the problem.
Such a flippant attitude has not gone down well with advertisers, who are up in arms about the problem. Some have even resorted to legal action. Google reached a settlement in March with Lane’s Gifts andCollectibles, a gift shop based inArkansas, and agreed to offer refunds to advertisers who claim they have been charged for bogus clicks. Such refunds are capped at $ 90m, however, so many observers think Google got off lightly.And in June Yahoo! promised to intensify its efforts to fight click fraud as part of a settlement withCheckMate, a fraud-detection firm.As well as offering refunds for clicks determined to be fraudulent, Yahoo! agreed to appoint a "traffic-quality advocate" to voice advertisers’ concerns within the company.
In the wake of these legal challenges, Google and Yahoo! recently joined a working group at the InteractiveAdvertisingBureau (I
网考网参考答案：D
网考网解析：
细节题。由题干中的click fraud定位至第四段，浏览该段发现没有与各选项相关的内容，则顺延至第五段，该段提到企业家Bill Gross早在1998年首创“点击付费”广告模式时采用的应对“点击欺诈的办法”：他安装了一个三层防护系统，先利用滤过系统将已知的点击欺诈者拒之门外，然后通过统计人员和软件审查可疑的点击样本，最后再会同广告商对得到的购买可能性数据进行分析并在必要时发出警告。可见， [A]、[B]和[C]是文章提到的内容，虽然这里提到statisticians，但是不知道他们的身份如何，是聘用的，还是临时请来帮忙的，[D]为过度推断，故为答案。 document.getElementById("warp").style.display="none"; document.getElementById("content").style.display="block"; 查看试题解析出处>>