Ted’s Tubes: Click Fraud, TRUSTe Survey, US in Slow Lane on Broadband and Day of the Dolphin

IAB – Click Fraud Reaches Nearly $12B

This year, click fraud is on track to cost marketers $11.6 billion in advertising — up 22% from 2013 — according to survey findings released earlier this week by Solve Media. To combat click fraud, the IAB has released its final version of best practices which is available here.

TRUSTe Research Reveals Troubling Trend

To kick off Data Privacy Day 2014, TRUSTe®, the leading global Data Privacy Management (DPM) company, today released its latest U.S. Consumer Confidence Index, which shows that a high proportion of U.S. adults aged 18 and older are worried about their privacy online, online trust is declining and the potential impact on business remains high. 74 percent of U.S. internet users are more concerned about privacy than a year ago and more users cite business data collection, than government surveillance programs, as the reason for the increase in their concerns.

US Broadband Users – Paying More for Less

The World Economic Forum ranked the U.S. 35th out of 148 countries worldwide in terms of Broadband Capacity, while a a new study by Speedtest.net ranks the US 31st in download speed. NASDQ reports that the U.S. is falling behind countries like Estonia, Hungary, and Uruguay.

And considering the average download speed across the globe is 16.20 Mbps, we are only a handful of spots away from ranking below average. Upload speeds are even more humiliating. Globally, we rank 42nd with an average upload speed of 6.31 Mbps, behind Lesotho, Belarus, Slovenia, and other countries you only hear mentioned on Jeopardy.

PolicyMic finds this “pathetic” from the country that invented the internet.

How bad is it? Well, the New York Times makes a fun comparison to demonstrate just how far behind the U.S. is falling. The Times takes a look at internet speeds in San Antonio, Texas— the seventh largest city in the U.S. with a population of 1.4 million — and measures it against internet speeds in Riga, Latvia — a city with 700,000 people. And what did they find? Riga’s average internet speed is “at least two-and-a-half times that of San Antonio’s” while “the cost of Riga’s service is about one-fourth that of San Antonio.” So people in San Antonio pay four times as much for internet at least half as fast.

Why is this the case, Susan Crawford, a law professor and author of Captive Audience: The Telecom Industry and Monopoly Power in the New Gilded Age, blames big telecom for this failure since due to consolidation more than 80 percent of Americans have only one choice for broadband.

In Seoul, when you move into an apartment, you have a choice of three or four providers selling you symmetric fiber access for $30 per month, and installation happens in one day. That’s unthinkable in the United States.

Instead for American consumers, their only choice will be a local cable monopoly with little incentive to fund nationwide fiber-optic upgrades.

Domain Auctions – Four $1M+ Sales in 2013

With Domain Journal’s final year end data in, there were four sales in excess of $1 million bringing the total to 12 for the decade. The million dollar domains were:

IG.com ($4.7MM)
KK.com ($2.4MM)
114.com ($2.1MM)
eBet.com ($1.35MM)

2013 Worst passwords

Top 20 of the most common passwords used:

1-5: 123456; password; 12345678; qwerty; abc123
6-10: 123456789; 111111; 1234567; iloveyou; adobe123
11-15: 123123; admin; 1234567890; letmein; photoshop
16-20: 1234; monkey; shadow; sunshine; 12345

Using passwords like these are inexcusable and an invitation to hackers and the cyber equivalent to walking around with a “kick me” sign. If you want to check how secure your password, try a site like passwordmeter.com or howsecureismypassword.net

Scott Richter’s Dynamic Dolphin Registrar Shut Down By ICANN

Dynamic Dolphin, the rogue registrar owned by Scott Richter’s CPA Empire (a subsidiary of Media Breakaway) has been stripped of its registrar status as of November 22, 2013 due to its failure to disclose Richter’s ownership interest and prior felony conviction for grand larceny. All domains registered with the one-time Spam King were transferred to BigRock Solutions Ltd. As reported in Performance Marketing Insider:

Dynamic Dolphin had a serious issue in that “more than 10 percent of the company’s 45,000-plus domains have false WHOIS data, and more than 17 percent of the domains registered through the company have been observed being advertised through spam.”

Richter gained national prominence a decade ago after his extremely embarrassing defense of spam in his 2004 appearance on The Daily Show.