We note that also, some of you may not have received your cheques yet, please read more if you have a pending cashout that has not reached you yet. Thanks.

When can I expect to receive my payment?

Why have I not received my payment?
If you have not received your payment, it can be due to either one of the following factors:

1. The payment was sent, however, was not delivered successfully to your address. Please let us know if your payment was scheduled to be arrived (according to the table above) but has not arrived.

2. Your payment has been processed & sent, and has yet to arrive. Please be patient, and consult the schedule above to gauge when your payment should arrive. If it is delayed (and beyond what is stated on the schedule), please contact us.

3. Your name & address details were incomplete/erroneous, and the cheque was not delivered successfully, and was returned to Advertlets. Or, the cheque has yet to be sent due to your full name not being filled in. Please make sure to whitelist the e-mail address “info@advertlets.com” in your e-mail application to make sure that the support team will be able to contact you regarding these matters.

4. Your payment has not been processed yet due to click fraud. If your cashout is marked “Unpaid/DENIED”, please cooperate with the Advertlets Support team to determine the legitimacy of your earnings, and whether an audit or ban is forthcoming. If you believe there may be sabotage, please provide details.

5. Your payment is not due to be processed yet. Our usual payment terms are 30-45 days from the end of the month which you cashed out.

What could be the reason for the delay?

Several factors that contributed to the regrettable delay were:

- An upgrade in the integration of our cheque processing system to our publisher database. This was a necessary upgrade due to an increase in the amount of people cashing out faster each month due to the lauch of the Advertlets Titan program that offers higher payout rates. Hence, this upgrade will enable more cheques to be processed simultaneously in future.

- An upgrade to our click quality auditing mechanisms. The new system is more accurate in auditing click quality, however, in its earlier stages, its processing efficiency was lower, hence the delay in verifying earnings. We have now rolled out a faster build, and you should not face such delays in future for all legitimate cashouts. However, those that engage in fraudulent activity are now even more likely to have their earnings invalidated.

What is not allowed? What is fradudulent activity?
The following can be determined as part of click/impression fraud, which is attempting and will invalidate your Advertlets account & earnings. This applies to all our ad formats.

- Auto refreshing your page excessively to generate more impressions
- Clicking on your own Advertlets Ad Units
- Obscuring the Advertlets Ad Unit through use of layers
- Animating/scrolling the Advertlets Ad Unit through the use of javascript/AJAX
- Hiding the “Ads by Advertlets” tab on your Advertlets Ad Unit
- Exhorting your site visitors to click on your own ads, through the use of pleading/misleading/manipulative text/images, whether on the blog itself or other mediums

Generally, if you’re concerned about what is prohibited, the general rule of thumb is just think about it this way: If you were an advertiser on Advertlets, would you be pleased if someone did that?

If you require further details/clarification on what defines fraudulent activity or regarding the status of your cashout, do contact Advertlets Support at info@advertlets.com or lodge a ticket at http://www.advertlets.com/support

Q: Recently, there has been a publisher in the network who has accused Advertlets of unfairly withholding earnings. Is that person innocent or guilty of click fraud?

A: We are releasing details to support our unjustly accused position, please see the graph below. In this case, we are very confident that this publisher has been engaging in click fraud. The traffic & earning profile for this account has been extremely irregular, as you will notice from the graph below:

In particular, earning RM33.20 in Cost Per Click advertising in one day (04th October) for a blog that averages less than 30 unique impressions a day,is quite unrealistic. You wil note also that the majority of clicks per day are very irregular compared to the rest of the chart. Most importantly, the majority of clicks were confirmed to originiate from the publisher in question.

We do not take pleasure in banning accounts such as these, however, we have to safeguard the interests of our advertisers as well as other bloggers. We have attempted to contact the publisher in question to clarify, however the publisher in question has not been cooperative in answering our questions, and shortly after the account was suspended for click fraud, the publisher removed phone number & address contact details from our database.

Q: Can I click on my own ads?
A: No. Deliberate clicks on an ad to increase profits can result in termination of your accout.

Q: Can I ask visitors to click on my ads?
A: No. Please do not encourage visitors to click the ads by placing wordings such as “please click!” or “check out our sponsor”. You may face immediate account termination if we find that you are doing so.

Someone else has been clicking on my ads a lot to sabotage my earnings by clicking repeatedly on my ads
Please let us know if you believe someone is trying to do so, and we will send you a list of questions to help us determine the problem.

How does your click fraud system work?
We use a combination of the following: duplicate click detection, automated robot detection, IP address, geolocation, pattern recognition, filtering technology, as well as human intervention. The system details and inner workings are confidential and cannot be disclosed for security reasons and to prevent abuse. However, if needed, we are prepared to release details of our server logs for forensic analysis of server log files to third parties or a court of law for verification.

We hope this answers your questions, thanks. Please play nice, and fair, for us to make this work for everyone’s benefit. Cheers!

In Short: The Resolution
- September 2007 Cash outs will arrive to both Malaysian & Singaporean publishers within 1-2 weeks. Yes, we are aware that this is longer than usual, and we apologize. A detailed explanation is after the jump.

- Ad load time could be improved. A recent increase in the number of members and more visitors from countries other than Malaysia and Singapore has put a considerable strain on our servers. Although we are now already running on three dedicated servers, we will be upgrading our resources further to serve your better. An upgrade will be in effect within this week, with approximately 15-30 minutes of downtime required. This scheduled maintenance window will be announced shortly.

The Long Of It: The Issues & Reasons
When we first launched the Cost Per Click Ad system for Advertlets in 24th May 2007, we were excited at the fact that we would be able to serve 100% of all the blogs that have signed up with us and have installed our code. Which means that it would not be hundreds of blogs that get ads. It would be thousands. And it was a fair exchange, where relevant ads were served on all types of blogs, however, each blog would be given a chance to prove themself with the advertiser paying accordingly.

Unfortunately, some people spoil it for the rest. Recently we have had a few publishers in particular who have been attempting to profit from fraudulent activities – which is largely responsible for the delay in processing payments, but we are not making it an excuse. Usually, in the past, we would process the cash out requests as a group per month, and then send them out when all for the month have been verified.

However, we understand that our honest publishers are definitely going to be frustrated at the delay – which would justify a change in our process flow, so we’ve taken the decision to release the legitimate cheques this week, rather than take more time to process and clear the more doubtful cases. This change in policy will also apply to all future requests from now on. Hence, all valid earnings for September should reach publishers within the next 1-2 weeks from today. Please let us know if you face any delay receiving your payments.

We’ve spoke about this issue before, but it has come to our attention that there are new “tricks” being pulled in addition to click fraud, including hiding Advertlets ad units under graphic layers (effectively, hiding the ad) and impression fraud through use of proxies and botnets. We do not recommend trying these any under circumstance, and it most likely will result in an immediate ban. One more discouraging trend we’ve noticed recently: please refrain from scrolling Advertlets ad units using javascript animation, as obscuring the ad through movement does not justify the amount the advertiser is paying for a fixed spot. And of course, don’t ever put notices such as “please click on my ads!”. Its rather dissapointing to see cases like this happening, especially within the blogging community – sometimes even people that we have met in person. But we have to be fair for the good of all, and take action for the benefit of many.

Please take note of the following terms: Irregular clicks, which may be caused by accidental refresh requests, timeouts or server errors, non-excessive accidental clicks, and are usually “not your fault”. Impression fraud relates to using artificial methods to increase traffic. Click fraud is a proven case where we have established with great surely that someone is attempting to game the system. Naturally, we would need to assess the extent of which fraud has been commited, before deciding on further action, which requires human intervention – to audit if the amount is low or to ban if the amount is excessive. And in most cases, if your cash out function is disabled, it means that the system has automatically detected fraudulent activities.

As said before, its generally accepted that blogging is one of the most free, honest forms of expression available today. Apply the same philosophy to earning through your blog, and you can’t go wrong. We will continue to try our best, and listen to your feedback, and evolve as needed. Lastly, if you have any questions at all, do contact us, or if it ever goes unanswered, contact me personally. Thanks.

Here’s what’s interesting: The main point of this upgrade is the new “daily limits” system, that will enable advertisers to distribute their budget across a period of time. So, even if you’re an advertiser with a small budget of RM500 / USD149, you can run a cost per click campaign that distributes your budget across a month, for instance. Your ad will be run rotated with other ads, targeted by geolocation and demographics.

Just like how we aim to enable all bloggers to make some money through blogging, now we aim to let advertisers of all budgets advertise on Advertlets. This is a very important step in our development as a blog advertising network, and we will appreciate your help to squash bugs while we are still in beta. Very soon, you will see a lot more advertisers as more people take advantage of this new feature for our valued advertisers…and ultimately, more advertisers means more money+happy for more bloggers.

We need your help though, to make this happen: If you find any bugs or error messages, do e-mail us with a screenshot to info@advertlets.com. Your valuable assistance is much appreciated while we upgrade our system to serve you better.

“Adverlets have no right to stop or disable the account cause they don’t even have the skill to do it, by IP that is impossible, cause Malaysian user use STREAMX, which Dynamic IP and for 3g/3.5 use fix IP but that is only 2 IP but sharing with other THOUSAND user in Malaysia.

My Advice for Adverlets, if adverlets can’t afford to pay, PLEASE pull your self out from this GROUND, you not qualify. “

Actually, its not quite impossible, and we do have the skill. And we can afford to pay, are firmly rooted here, and “we are qualify”. And its spelled Advertlets, with a T.

The comment above shows firstly, a lack of understanding of the how the internet works (and maybe proper grammar as well), and also underestimates our capabilities. Some of you though, might be interested to know what kind of technology we are using and how we fight click fraud, so we will explain:

Since March 23rd 2007, we have been able to detect which ads are served via which ISPs. Through our partnership with broadband research and reform initiative RedesignMalaysia.com, we can tell the difference between which IPs are from: TM Net, DiGi Internet Exchange, NasionCom, MaxisNet, Airzed, Time Telekom, NTT MSC / Arc Net, Jaring / MIMOS (MIX), CNX Solutions, EB Technologies, Bizsurf, and more.

We are very well aware of what ISP is used, and we can tell the difference between shared IPs and individuals, and of course, we can definitely determine which ISP a suspected click frauder is using. Hence, we will continue to prosecute click fraud when we find it, through our advanced ISP database.

On a brighter note though, the usage of the ISP database is not just for click fraud detection, but also so we can determine which IPs to serve ads to. This makes sure we can “catch” all relevant visitor IPs and serve them appropiate ads (resulting in better earnings for bloggers), rather than use an off the shelf geolocation system bought from overseas suppliers, or worse still, no geolocation at all. Naturally, this also allows advertisers to maximize their budget and not show their ads to an irrelevant audience.

In short, the ISP database allows us to: if its a local ad, a Malaysian product/service meant for Malaysians, we make sure it is displayed to only Malaysians: and that advertisers pay for that value, and bloggers reap the rewards as well.

We can say with confidence that this is not something that our competitors have, so if you find that your blog has mainly visitors from the same country you are (eg Malaysia) and you have been earning well through Advertlets, the ISP database is to thank for that. And, through our partners:RedesignMalaysia/Josh Lim & Associates, we also work together with ISPs of Malaysia on special projects whether it is web design or broadband related consultancy – hence our ISP database is upgraded regularly.

On a side note: The click fraud case of late was not the first case that we prosecuted, however, it was probably the most prominent one, especially due to the “Ngok Yan Sin Gou Jong” mentality. (Which kind of translates into: you know you are in the wrong yet you scold people first).

If you do come across any people conducting unethical behaviour, or prompting visitors to click on ads, you can let us know too, for the good of the whole community. Thanks, stay honest and we wish all of you successful, ethical earning and more money + happy with Advertlets.

- The blogger has been clicking on his/her own ads (click fraud)
- The blogger has been asking visitors to click on his/her own ads. (invalid clicks)

After an account has been frozen, we will then manually conduct an investigation to determine the extent of the fraud, and then decide whether to terminate or suspend the account. Accounts are never terminated without physical human intervention. In better news, a few honest bloggers have e-mailed to tell us that they clicked on their own ads by accident. Your honesty is appreciated, and we would like to thank you for that.

You may have noticed that recently we went from beta 1.5 to beta 1.75. This is largely in part due to an advanced click fraud detection system, now in its 6th iteration with over 34 detection algorithms. Personally, the team at Advertlets does not like to terminate or freeze accounts, especially blogs that we enjoy reading or even people we have personally invited to join the network. However, for the good of the network, we have to and we will if needed.

We would like to say: Play nice, don’t be evil, and assume we know what you’re doing, because we do.

Its generally accepted that blogging is one of the most free, honest forms of expression available today. Apply the same philosophy to earning through your blog, and you can’t go wrong. Thank you.

Update: The blogosphere responds (relevant points highlighted) –

Lilian: Click Fraud Case In Local Malaysian Ads “…to track click frauds and give advertisers the confidence that they are paying for value clicks. This way, it will ensure the growth of the local ads industry and benefits us bloggers.
Sometimes, it is good to look at the big picture and play our parts in encouraging online advertisements. How bright the future is, depends on us bloggers.”

Wayne : Don’t Click On Your Own Ads“I personally think that clicking our own ads is an act of selfishness and stupidity because you cannot underestimate the technology that advertising platforms use nowadays to prevent click fraud. Apart from that, the expansion of blog advertising network will get throttled as advertisers will end up paying more than the results that they get. With this happening, they will rank online blog advertisements as their last resort to gain exposure and we bloggers will end up earning “wind”…”You may get the ego of earning real fast money with fraudulent clickings which after that, you can boast to your friends about the stats but I can tell you, the notification of you getting banned will be a stunning one.”

Freethinker: Click Fraud & and Unexpected Ally“Before CPC, some were strong supporters that honestly is in the hearts of everyone, some claim beyond the extend that it was insulting their integrity on thinking such low class acts could be reproduced…Both needed the bloggers and bloggers want the money through them ( and gatherings ). One can’t exactly achieve the mentioned items without the other.”

1. Advertlets is now on our THIRD dedicated server. You guys are generating ridiculous amounts of traffic, and the network has grown significantly, congratulations! This should solve most, if not all downtime and slow loading issues for now. We would like to thank you for your patience & enthusiasm, and your faith in us so far. If you do notice your blog taking longer to load, do refer to this post on how you can test your blog for what may be causing the slowdown. Do contact us and let us know if you notice any errors or slowdown, if you have narrowed down the cause to our side, thanks!

2. Malaysians: Your cheques for July should arrive to you within the next 7 days, barring unforseen postal delays. Sorry for the delay this month, there has been approximately a 300% increase in bloggers cashing out. We have also been doing a comprehensive human auditing of accounts for click fraud to prevent “false positives”, after the system has automatically flagged certain accounts.

3. Singaporeans: Certain Singaporean blog publishers whose banks have had issues with Malaysian cheques will be reissued with compatible methods of payment, and should also receive it within 7-14 days.

4. The Rumpun Gathering was a great success and it definitely did berjaya! Look out for not one, but two upcoming sponsored gatherings over the next two months!

5. We have something very the interesting one, planned for Merdeka, coming very soon. No prizes for guessing the launch date…

6. We haven’t forgotten about the Advertlets sticker and button badge contest, don’t fret. Results will be announced within the next 7 days.

7. The RoomsDB opportunity for Malaysians & Singaporeans has been made even more lucrative, and the deadline set to 15th September.

And now for some important stuff, please read:

1. Unfortunately, we have banned a few more blog publishers for click fraud, and all invalid earnings have been disqualified, and returned to the network. We have recently upgraded our click fraud detection system even further, in addition to doing manual checks to make sure we don’t penalize anyone by mistake. We aim to encourage an honest, productive blog ad network, and would like to remind our publishers not to engage in fraudulent behaviour.

2. We will be starting to contact ALL individual blog publishers who have been requesting visitors to “click on their ads”. Our system has automatically flagged a few that have been doing so, and we are giving grace period of 1 week from this date to remove all references that encourage visitors to click ads. Please see the KnowledgeBase for further information.

1. StarCeleb Reviewers! You will be credited for the reviews as soon as we have finished compiling all the posts and determined your traffic.

2. Enthusiastic Referrers! The result of the Advertlets referral contest will be announced, before July 15th!

3. Singaporeans! Some (and hopefully most) of the Advertlets Team will be at the Ping.sg party on 07/07/07. Hope to meet you guys there!

4. Singapore.RoomsDB.net is now running ads on Singaporean blogs. Think its a great campaign and would like to be a part of it? If we’ve left you out, just let us know, and we will table your blog for consideration (those over 18 only, preferably residing in Singapore/students).

5. We’ve launched a brand new ad format for a brand new advertiser. More details on this soon, but some of you may already have seen it on a few of our more popular blogs…

6. Another Advertlets Gathering is planned soon (within the month, hopefully) for Klang Valley & East Malaysia. Let us know on your ideas, and what you’ll like to see happen, or what you can contribute!

7. And of course…the cheques are coming, again!. This time, its even bigger than before – 3 bloggers are in the 4 digit range…and the total amount of payout this month is more than three times what we paid out last month. Payments will most likely arrive around the first half of July, just so you know.

8. However, on a more serious note: those of you who have been involved in click fraud will have your payments denied, and possibly be banned. We will evaluating on a case by case basis whether or not to terminate your account permanently.