To me, Click Fraud implies something more competitive, like clicking the ads for a competitor or clicking the ads on your own web site. In this case, the clicking is straight anti-capitalist and is done purely out of spite.
Why? If someone is searching for "mesothelioma treatment," that's a pretty specific thing. And if they click your ad, you might make thousands (or tens of thousands) of dollars off the patient.
If you make money that way, it's totally worth it.
It certainly does seem to suggest that there might be a worthwhile business opportunity (at least for those with loose morals) in connecting people with personal injury lawyers.
If these guys are willing to pay that much to have people sent their way, there's got to be a way to take advantage of this.
Are you joking? I just went there and made a cool 187.2 million! Now, all I have to do is complete a few offers and then get a few of my friends to do the same...
A couple years ago my wife thought she'd do an April Fool's joke for her wedding wiki. I convinced her to work in the word "Mesothelioma" just to see what Google Adsense did (please don't click on the ads! seriously.):
Heh, I actually tried to look at the ads, but I couldn't figure out how to get Firefox to display them. I disabled AdBlock and NoScript and still nothing.
Anyway, I am amused that I no longer know how to see ads even if I want to see them.
Presumably there were two or more Michigan personal injury law firms who got involved in a bidding war at some stage.
Something similar must be going on for mesothelioma (which I had to look up, but is the kind of lung cancer you get from asbestos. The adwords are, of course, all for personal injury lawyers, though many of them disguise this fact. I clicked on a few of 'em just to deprive them of some money).
Mesothelioma has been the top-valued search term for quite awhile. Aggressive bidding is obviously behind it, but that doesn't mean it's irrational: mesothelioma acquired from exposure to asbestos is very often actionable. It's not just Adwords; asbestos attorneys advertise disproportionately on TV. They are apparently easy and lucrative cases to win.
It's not spam (or at least I didn't intend for it to be spam). I just found it interesting that it's worth it for lawyers to pay so much for these search terms.
Perhaps I should have posted the article I found this through:
Unfortunately the page itself links to lots of internal pages which are broken but clearly designed to trick the search engines (if the PHP scripts worked properly).
For what it's worth, I thought the article was pretty informative. It turns out that lawyers can pay a lot for this particular kind of case because asbestos is about the only cause of that kind of cancer. The lawyer just gets a settlement with parties rather than litigating for years.
The highest paying search terms are the ones that generate the greatest revenues. Daily Revenue = (# clicks/day)(cost per click).