What are CAPTCHAs and why CAPTCHA Advertising?

Most Web 2.0 sites today offer a wide range of possibilities for viewers to interact online (via blogs, social networks, entertainment, gaming and popular culture sites etc.).

Unfortunately these interaction points are increasingly misued by automated spam programs that are capable of causing widespread site disruption and user dissatisfaction if not stopped. As a result, site owners are forced to widely deploy so-called CAPTCHAs to prevent spam bots.

What is a CAPTCHA? Within websites, the task of a CAPTCHA is to identify the user as a human being. The idea is to debar so-called "SPAM-bots" from causing damage to the websites. In its current form, users are asked to decipher a distorted string of letters and to enter them into a text field:

Every day an estimated 250 million CAPTCHAs are displayed on the Internet. Websites like Facebook and MySpace, for example, use CAPTCHAs to prevent spam attacks. But there are two problems with CAPTCHAs as they currently function. The first is that SPAM-bots can recognize and decipher these CAPTCHAs at a rate of nearly 100%. To combat this, CAPTCHA providers have increased the complexity of these strings, which has led to a second problem. Now, human beings often have a difficult time deciphering these codes. Thus, while a CAPTCHA is solved easily by a computer, it presents an ever greater challenge for the user.

By comparison, CaptchaAds (Captcha Advertising) are short video spots in which users enter information that they retrieve from a short and targeted video. Automated programs cannot retrieve such information. This additionally ensures that the person entering the data is a human and not a spam-bot.  CaptchaAds represent a win-win for all online stakeholders: