Internet Marketing Blog by Noon-an-Night

I was a little caught off guard yesterday when an email titled “Legal notice of class action settlement” showed up in my inbox. When I saw the title, I assumed it was a piece of spam that had gotten past GMail’s spam filters. However, once I opened it, I quickly realized that it was a legitimate piece of email.

The central focus of the email is a class action settlement involving MIVA and its subsidiaries such as SearchFeed. In case you aren’t familiar with MIVA, it’s what I would call a third-tier PPC engine. I think it was around 6-8 months ago when I ran a few campaigns to test it out. However, I spent less than sixty dollars on the campaign because it didn’t take long to figure out that the majority of the “traffic” that was being generated was invalid. So, when I saw that there was a class action settlement against them involving PPC click fraud, I was anything but surprised.

Looking through the legal document, I noticed the lead party in the lawsuit was Lane’s Gifts and Collectibles. A quick Google search showed that this was the same party that was involved in the 2006 Google Click Fraud Settlement.

As with any legal document, the Notice I received was somewhat lengthy. However, the main point of the Notice can be summarized in the following excerpt:

The settlement will provide advertising credits to class members who certify that they were the victims of “click fraud” or other invalid or improper clicks on online advertisements purchased from MIVA on or after January 1, 2000 and on or before September 30, 2007, or from Lycos on or after September 23, 2002 and on or before March 30, 2006.

The settlement will resolve claims that MIVA and Lycos allegedly breached contracts with advertisers and violated other laws by failing to adequately detect and stop “click fraud” or other invalid or improper clicks on online advertisements.

Because of the tiny amount of money I spent with the program, I have no personal interest in following through with the settlement. However, if you have spent any significant amount of money with MIVA or any of its subsidiaries, you can find out all of your rights as a member of the class action by visiting the official settlement website. However, keep in mind that the reimbursement will come in the form of “advertising credits,” so I’m not sure how appealing that will be to most people.