Recently a blog quoted Eric Schmidt about click fraud. A whirlpool of media coverage followed. Mostly misdirected. Because the blog presented selected excerpts and ignored the context of the remarks.

Eric Schmidt spoke at a SIEPR economics event at Stanford in March. A presentation and Q&A that followed during which he made the comments.  We have reproduced the clarification from Google here-

Here's the relevant question Eric was asked about click fraud: "Recently there’s been some talk about click fraud being a potential threat to the entire advertising business model. I was just wondering what your thoughts on that were and if there’s an economic solution to it more than just technical solutions."

The fact is that Google strives to detect every invalid click that passes through its system, and to prevent those clicks from ever reaching an advertiser's account. And Eric and many others at Google have discussed the problem of invalid clicks publicly many times — on our quarterly earnings calls, at our Press Day, and in other places, such as blogs. Anyone who has followed Google knows that Eric, and others at Google, have stated several times that Google fights invalid clicks, that we've devoted significant resources to manage it, and that we take it very seriously.