Everyone knows that click fraud (that is, people clicking on their own adsense ads or their competitors’ adwords ads) is a major problem for Google, but we didn’t know until today that Eric Schmidt (Google CEO) was taking part! Apparently, he quite happily clicks on Google’s ads to ‘check if they are working’, presumably charging the advertisers in the process!

I am somewhat surprised to hear that Google does not have more sophisticated service monitoring than the CEO ocassionally clicking on the ads. Schmidt clearly needs to be careful about what he says on click fraud; first that as an economic phenomenon click fraud is self correcting (implying that Google isn’t very worried about it), and now that he quite happily clicks on his own ads. Not a very good example.

[via Nathan Weinberg]