If you have at least one website going that has any kind of user interaction whatsoever — heck, if you have an e-mail address — then you've had the pleasure of dealing with spammers. It's always going to be a cat-and-mouse game with spam comments, e-mail, user registrations, trackbacks, etc. I've had to extricate this site from an near DDOS-level attack of spam comments that flooded my database — I got a comment every 10 seconds or so for a few days — because I didn't have a CAPTCHA on my comment form.
CAPTCHA is an acronym that stands for Completely Automated Procedure to Tell Computers and Humans Apart. It's those little “stupid human tricks,” like typing in nearly-illegible words from a picture of a 200-year-old text, that bloggers and other website owners often make their readers perform to prove that they're human and not a spam-bot. Stilting legitimate comments with a CAPTCHA is a necessary evil (a) to avoid a lot of noise creeping into the conversation, (b) to avoid something more intrusive like requiring registration, and (c) to save some shred of the website owner's sanity, whose job is already fairly challenging without dealing with a lot of irrelevant, SEO-driven “comments” on their site.
After moving to a DirectoryPress platform for a side project of mine called Money Forum List (why not have a looksie?) I found out that I really needed a CAPTCHA on my registration form. I just deleted something like 2,000 users who never actually submitted a link to the directory. I had that coming because there was no CAPTCHA there, but still, it just never ends.
This led me to a little research excursion into the economics of CAPTCHAs. There's got to be a lot of money in this or people wouldn't be doing it, right? So, here's some CAPTCHAnomics for you. 🙂
First, the demand side: I had heard that some organizations hire people to complete CAPTCHAs, but I was pretty amazed at how cheap it is to have an actual human figure out these visual puzzles. If this article is any indication, just hiring people to complete CAPTCHAs for you is dirt cheap: $1 per thousand. For the cost of a cup of coffee, you too can feed a spammer. So the barrier to entry for even uncracked CAPTCHAs is really low, the prospect of getting cheap eyeballs and clicks on your links, on sites that actually garner eyeballs and links, is low.
Then, the supply side: websites with traffic that allow comments. Webmasters quickly find out that the more popular a site gets, the bigger the target becomes on their back. It's a delicate line for a webmaster to toe, because making commenting more difficult for the CAPTCHA-breaking armies also makes it more difficult for the legitimate readers who want to contribute to the discussion. Make it too difficult for people to comment on your posts, and they'll stop, and maybe never come back.
This leaves webmasters in a losing position: all cost, no benefit.
I had heard about services that provide advertising-based CAPTCHAs: not only can I have a CAPTCHA on my registration forms and comment forms, I can get paid when people complete them. This isn't something I've seen a whole lot of around the web yet — and probably for good reason, because most people aren't thrilled about entering CAPTCHAs in the first place. But apparently it's time that CAPTCHAs got a monetization makeover.
Now, if there were just a way to get the CAPTCHAs to pay for legitimate readers. 🙂
I’m involved with ad ops for a large website and have experimented with monetized CAPTCHAs before, but the payout was VERY small, and there are many people who didn’t bother taking the time to do it. The key is placing them in important places like User Registration & Forgot Passoword forms, etc. There also aren’t a ton of advertisers buying into this yet, and you pretty much need to generate a TON of requests to make any kind of significant money… but still, ANY money is better than NO money, right?