Click Fraud and billions of lost dollars

Reading the Economist today I came across an article titled “Truth in advertising“, the article is about the growing online advertising industry and the issue of click fraud. In the article today the Economist states that the current ad spend on internet advertising is $27 billion a year and by 2010 this is expected to increase to $61 billion a year. With current click fraud rates around 10%, advertisers are looking at potential loses of $2.7 billion increasing to $6.1 billion in 2010 with questions being raised about what is being done to stop this?

Now in an effort to reassure advertisers about the online advertising market the IAB have started working with the search engines to define what click fraud/invalid clicks are and establish auditing and certification for the industry. Will this result in a drop in click fraud? Not sure, people will always find ways to circumvent the system.