India's Secret Army Of Online Ad 'Clickers'

TI-99/4A's RULE writes "Just when I thought I'd heard everything, I just read that, according to The Times of India, there are hordes of people in India clicking pay per click ads for a share of the CPC earnings. Have we gone back to the dotcom boom days again where people are tossing money away on stuff like this? Or is this just a temporary blip, with paid-per action sites like CurrentCodes representing more of a norm in online marketing?"

Comments

Darn Outsourcing!

[Anonymous Coward]

I had to hire my Ad-Clicking replacement today!

Re:Darn Outsourcing!

[filtur]

You think that's bad, I spent 2 months training my Ad-Clicking replacment!

Re:Darn Outsourcing!

[Mysticalfruit]

You think that's bad, I spent 2 months building a robot and then 2 months training it to be my Ad-Clicking replacement!

There is nothing a PS2 and a copy of vice city can't cure -- PA

Re:Darn Outsourcing!

[Glonoinha]

Is it my imagination or does this whole "India's Secret Army Of Online Ad 'Clickers'" thing seem a little unscrupulous? I mean, is there no honor left in this world? Surely there isn't an entire country full of unscrupulous people just looking for ways to exploit the things being done for genuine commercial business in America ...

Re:Darn Outsourcing!

[j.bellone]

You think that's bad? I'm the man you both hired to click on your ads, and I stole thousands of dollars from both of you and opened up my own ad-banner click service.

Re:Darn Outsourcing!

[tarunthegreat2]

Regarding your sig, here's a little know fact for y'all Americans:

Al Qaeda declared India the #2 enemy, right after USA. According to them, the only thing worse than a bunch of decadent, freedom-loving white people, are a bunch of decadent freedom-loving brown people. The one country which is GRATEFUL to America for busting ass in Afghanistan and making Pakistan a 'vassal' state is India. (But then again, all of your software base are belong us so....).

All in a days work in India

[erick99]

After a hard day of handling Dell's support calls or writing code for a Fortune 500 firm, the ever- intrepid worker from India troops home to click on overseas (read:American) ads for just a few more bucks before heading off to bed...

Happy Trails!

Erick

Re:All in a days work in India

[Blaubart]

Is it me, or isn't this one of those jobs that could further be outsourced, to um, I don't know, a script maybe?

Re:All in a days work in India

[Uber Banker]

Not really. The beauty of doing it from home is the clicks are distributed, the greatness of using people is their inherant unpredictability - they will click through. COmpanies that pay-per-click use sophisticated analysis to work out what is a script (and happily withhold payment if they think one is being used) - if you work out a truely undpredictable script that is intuitive enough to click through or face 'challenges' deliberately put in ads, and implement this on a wide range of IPs then you will have made millions and broken internet advertising as we know it!

Re:All in a days work in India

[LostCluster]

Funny, I my house I go straight for the interesting-to-me circulars, because I want to know what Best Buy and Circuit City are promoting this week. I don't particularly need to see the news content because I've seen enough news on TV and the Web during the week, but the ad content is something that doesn't come out until Sunday Morning, and is best presented in that way than on the web...

Re:All in a days work in India

[Paladin128]

Ok, then, use a distributed client... rent peoples CPU time, and run the script on millions of PC's.

Re:All in a days work in India

[netsharc]

How about throwing away those clicks that come from Indian IPs? Well I guess the advertising agency would then sue the people who's supposed to pay them money, and it will be fun.

The internet sucks now that the businesses and marketing types learnt about it, I wonder how many domain names out there which are just placeholders for an ad-serving page.

Re:All in a days work in India

[TykeClone]

Or a virus. "Borrow" millions of PC's to click through ads and sell spam relays on the side.

Re:All in a days work in India

[chimpo13]

Can't you just run a script to look through referrer tracking grouping suspicious referrals?

Re:All in a days work in India

[British]

So they run some sort of Turing test to see if it's a script(computer) or a human clicking those ads?

I think someone just needs to build a better click-script. Like for instance(now don't patent this), have it click at DIFFERENT spots on the same banner spot! yeah! IPO here I come!

Re:All in a days work in India

[Anonymous Coward]

Unlikely. By following the stream of money, they will track you down and you will spend the rest of your life ass ass whore (ok, so nothing will change for you).

Re:All in a days work in India

[Anonymous Coward]

isnt this what spyware already does?

Re:All in a days work in India

[SparafucileMan]

Or set up a public "warez" server that requires a password which is the nth word on the page following the ad. If you like you can make the files random bits rather than copyrighted software, then limit the bandwidth so horrendously so no one ever finishes a download. Incidentally, this was quite commmon practice on, say, Hotline servers back in the Boom days, and netted many a college student tens of thousands of dollars ($0.25 a click! $2 per signup to ebay!)...

Re:All in a days work in India

[Anonymous Coward]

So they run some sort of Turing test to see if it's a script(computer) or a human clicking those ads?

I can just see people filling out CAPTCHAs every time they click an ad... NOT.

Re:All in a days work in India

[BrynM]

How about throwing away those clicks that come from Indian IPs?

1 word: Proxy.

Re:All in a days work in India

[mattyrobinson69]

or instead of writing a script, write an executable which uses raw sockets - spoofs the IP address, pretends to be different IP stacks, and a secure random gap (/dev/random instead of /dev/urandom). You could run it from your own PC and nobody would ever know. hee hee.

Any fucker who steals my idea, i want a share of your profits you thieving bastards!

Re:All in a days work in India

[Anonymous Coward]

Who's clicking these things anyway? I had thought we all got tired of these banner ads back in the 90's. Perhaps now we know.

Re:All in a days work in India

[Felinoid]

True enough.
However someone will believe they can get away with it and once done they'll try it and when cought they'll actually think the judge will rule in favor of the virus.

Then while in jail complaining how the judge "dosen't get it" Buba will tell his story about how killing the store clerk over a pack of ciggerets was ok but the judge didn't get that eather.

Re:All in a days work in India

[pipingguy]

COmpanies that pay-per-click use sophisticated analysis to work out what is a script (and happily withhold payment if they think one is being used)...

Google's AdSense appears to do this. In my case, a week before the cheque was sent, the amount was higher than what was finally delivered. I'm assuming that account analysis is done just prior to the payment calculation in order to weed out clickage from seemingly oblious fraudsters.

Outsourced?

[Gadzuko]

Now where in America did those jobs come from?

Re:Outsourced?

[LostCluster]

The late 90s. Anybody remember all of the "Get paid to surf!" offers that were floating around back then?

Re:Outsourced?

[KDan]

Poor bastards must be on the streets now, holding signs: "My ad-clicking revenue went to india - please help - will click ads for food".

Daniel

Re:Outsourced?

[Short Circuit]

I remember seeing signs stapled to telephone poles around here that read, "Work at home! $3000/month!"

Turns out you were supposed to run spamming software for a guy.

Re:Outsourced?

[nacturation]

Like The Hunger Site?

Re:Outsourced?

[Anonymous Coward]

I remember seeing signs stapled to telephone poles around here that read, "Work at home! $3000/month!"

Turns out you were supposed to run spamming software for a guy.


Actually, those are for herbalife. Check out the special report from cockeyed.com.

Do they actually sit there clicking?

[stratjakt]

If they aren't smart enough to write a little script to do it for them, I'm less worried about my job being offshored.

Re:Do they actually sit there clicking?

[The Lynxpro]

"If they aren't smart enough to write a little script to do it for them, I'm less worried about my job being offshored."

Did you consider it might be cheaper to hire people to click the ads than to contract a company to write such a script? Its kinda like how the American military often threw up their arms after destroying various Vietnamese infrastructure during that conflict. They'd blow up a bridge, only to find it reconstructed a few days labor thanks to what the Pentagon defined as "ant labor." The Western business-minded viewpoint would factor in contracts, heavy industry, materials, and all the like into costs, whereas a more simple society would just get a ton of unskilled workers out there to assemble the project (instead of relying on earth moving equipment). Or maybe a better example would be the Minnonites and the Amish in terms of barn raisings.

Re:Do they actually sit there clicking?

[dcrocha]

Back in 2000, a friend of mine used to leave his computer turned on 24/7 with that stupid AllAdvantages software showing up lots of ads. He expected to make hundreds of dollars, as advertised.

After 4 months of extreme adclicking, he received a U$35,00 and was not very happy about the amount, but decided to cash it anyway. We are from Brazil, so when we need to cache a check from US, we need to go to Citibank. There, they charged him U$70,00 to cash the check. I had the biggest laugh of my life and he thought about a lawsuit AllAdvantages, but I told him that the lawyers would charge him a lot more than the money he wanted to receive.

Re:Do they actually sit there clicking?

[Lord Kano]

The Western business-minded viewpoint would factor in contracts, heavy industry, materials, and all the like into costs, whereas a more simple society would just get a ton of unskilled workers out there to assemble the project (instead of relying on earth moving equipment).

And these people would often be willing to do it for free. They were farmers, they needed to move their oxen, buffalo and goats (ok, I made up the goats part) across the river as well. They were helping themselves at the same time.

Oh, that plus the NVA and Viet Cong had AK-47s.

LK

Re:Do they actually sit there clicking?

[arnie_apesacrappin]

Did you consider it might be cheaper to hire people to click the ads than to contract a company to write such a script

I had a similar experience recently that made me aware of my Western ideas about labor. My company was in the process of building a new plant in China (for goods to be delivered in China only, no exports). Several IT people went over to help them get their infrastructure setup. There was a large safe in the area that was to become the datacenter. The safe needed to be taken out of the room and down three flights of stairs.

If you asked me how to do it, I would have said to rent a forklift and use the freight elevator. My Chinese counterparts thought differently. They got 20 people with straps and carried that safe out of the room and down three flights of stairs. For them, that was the cheapest, most efficient way to solve the problem.

Re:Do they actually sit there clicking?

[milo_Gwalthny]

When I was in India (admittedly, 10 years ago) there were people crouching in the middle of the street painting the yellow lines. Scared the hell out of me, considering how my taxi driver was driving.

I guess it was cheaper than buying a truck with a paint brush attached.

Re:Do they actually sit there clicking?

[Phurd Phlegm]

They got 20 people with straps and carried that safe out of the room and down three flights of stairs. For them, that was the cheapest, most efficient way to solve the problem.

And the first 20 people that slipped and were flattened under the safe were used as cheap, efficient fertilizer!

Seriously, when the cost of an injury is small, things like this make a lot more sense. What would the repercussions have been if someone had been crushed like Wile E. Coyote while moving the safe? I assume the answer is "nothing?" Or maybe 20 people were enough that no one could reasonably be mashed?

Re:Do they actually sit there clicking?

[NoOneInParticular]

All depends on how long you're willing to pay these people to click adds. Once you have the script, you're done. Pay for electricity for one computer (instead of dozens), and for the next few years you are set. In the long run, the script is cheaper. Computer programs work like that: solve the problem once, and suddenly marginal costs dissapear. No matter how cheap labour is, it's hard to beat a single script on a single computer with a single connection.

Re:Do they actually sit there clicking?

[The Lynxpro]

"In the long run, the script is cheaper. Computer programs work like that: solve the problem once, and suddenly marginal costs dissapear."

You aren't factoring in the cost if something is buried in the script by the outsourced programmer. What if the script is crippled? Considering how many college educated Indians are looking for work, you could *always* find cheap replacements.

Re:Do they actually sit there clicking?

[Anonymous Coward]

Readers of this posting should note that the comma here serves as a decimal place. It's $35 and $70.

Re:Do they actually sit there clicking?

[plover]

Except the problem keeps changing. Advertisers have long feared the advent of automated "click-to-pay" scripts, and have developed schemes to both frustrate script-writers and to perform human confirmations.

Your scripts would have to be so smart that they would not give away their presense even when the advertiser's humanconf scheme changes. If they change their advertising, say from "Click the logo of your sports team" to "click the picture of the prettiest cheerleader" but the script keeps clicking the same location (now occupied by a black zone, or of a referee or something that is obviously not a pretty cheerleader) then they'll disallow any pending payments to the web page host claiming that a bot is doing the clicking. They might even bring up "lawyers...mumble...fraud" or send a Cease and Desist letter.

Scripts would have to be smart enough to not make those mistakes, or at least they'd have to be monitored by a human to prevent them from giving themselves away. At that point, why not invest a couple of rupees and let someone else foot the electric bills and bandwidth charges?

Re:Do they actually sit there clicking?

[furchin]

That's when you send spam to millions of people in America saying you need help cashing the check, and that they can keep 20% of the profits if they'll just send you their bank information and address.

Re:Do they actually sit there clicking?

[gnuman99]

And how much did that cost him for electricity? :)

Re:Do they actually sit there clicking?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes just the same way when I came to US and got shit scared of people minding their own business and driving on the "wrong" side of the road. My point: cultural shock.

Re:Do they actually sit there clicking?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow... All Advantage brings back some memories! In college, my roommate and I set up four 486's with Win95, and 5 user accounts per machine... and one monitor and keyboard between them! We set up some user accounts in a classic pyramid scheme, downloaded a mouse-moving app to make the banner think that there was a human at the machine, rotated the accounts every day or two, and proceeded to rake in the money! We ended up with abou $400 per month, which isn't bad beer money in college! Of course, the machines were named "franklin", "jackson", "lincoln" and "hamilton" (after $100, $20, $5, $10 bills ;-) )

At some point, there was a class-action lawsuit against All Advantage, for which I (anonymously) documented our experience. For posterity, I'll post my account here:

Your Name: Devon Nullworth
Your Company: Devon Nullworth & Associates
Your Telephone Number: (256) 512-1024
Your Email Address: devnull@devnull.com

Actually, my associates and I had a wonderful experience with All Advantage. My associates included four 486's, one monochrome monitor, one keyboard, a copy of "mousedrift.exe" and a T3 LAN. And 20 hotmail and/or yahoo mail accounts. In any case, after careful examination of the "pyramid scheme", my associates and I determined the perfect referral tree structure, as well as the required working hours. Due to the nature of their work, each of my mail account associates each worked one 25 hour shift per month. The hours were a little more strenuous for my 486 associates. However, they were still happy to contribute to corporate bliss by pulling 5 consecutive 25 hour shifts of surfing the web.

After some creativity on our mailing addresses (Devon Nullworth, Dev Nullworth, D. Nullworth, etc) All Advantage was happy to provide us with ample funds to keep my associates and I in tasty beverages until our next flock of payments arrived. Unfortunately, my associates did not get as much fun out of their web surfing as I did. Due to there only being one monitor between them, they had to share. This severely degraded their surfing pleasure, especially due to the fact that the monitor was turned off most of the time to save our precious energy. After all, Devon Nullworth & Associates is an environmentally concerned company, and Energy Star compliant as well.

However, due to unforseen circumstances (i.e. college graduation) Devon Nullworth & Associates was forced to terminate their partnership with All Advantage. Sadly, with their web surfing days behind them, my four 486 associates had to be laid off. One of them was rehired (with generous donations of parts from the other three) as a Linux mail server. This associate now reports much higher levels of satisfaction with his job, because reading supposedly "private" email is much more fun than surfing "about:blank" in IE.

As a whole, Devon Nullworth has been extremely pleased with All Advantage. However, the three associates who were laid off (we'll use the pseudonyms Andy, Ben, and Alex) would be happy to participate in the Class Action Suit against All Advantage. Andy feels that his feelings of personal wealth have been decreased by the termination of the All Advantage partnership. Ben states a similar opinion, but feels that Andy was lucky because he was able to keep his processor. Fortunately for Andy, he was a 33Mhz, and no one had any use for that particular piece. Of all three, Alex has the strongest case. Although he has been in a coma for a year (because someone stole his power cord) he still communicates his discomfort through static electricity discharges.

Re:Do they actually sit there clicking?

[tarunthegreat2]

Simple, they woulda shot the oaf who was clumsy enough for getting killed by safe....oh wait...

Re:Do they actually sit there clicking?

[tarunthegreat2]

There are LOT of people living in India. A LOT. Somehow Americans seem to miss this point. It is for that reason, that some jobs will always involve labour. You will NEVER find a self-service gas station. Each gas station will have 5/6 attendants. You will ALWAYS find a security guard posted outside an ATM (this is not just because it may be unsafe, it's actually AFFORDABLE to do this). And a LOT people have servants/maids other domestic help in their homes. Not because they are rich/feudal, but because of simple demand and supply. There is such a huge supply of low-skilled labour, that it comes very cheap.

Re:Do they actually sit there clicking?

[Neo's Nemesis]

I am from India, and with all surity i can say that its absolutely true. I have received mails regarding this, i have seen ads in cyber cafes about "Earn Rs. 15000 sitting home". When I responded to some of them, i was replied i needed to put Rs. 500 ($12) in from my side first, and after that i'll be giving a few clicking assignments, translations and stuff. In didn't need to get out of my schedule, just regular surfing, i was told.

I actually had joined a website which paid you to click like 4 years earlier. Made $10 when i realised i had spent more money on internet connection for it.

Re:Do they actually sit there clicking?

[Anonymous Coward]

5/6 gas attendants per station? security guards at ATMs? Sounds like New Jersey :-P

It's the 90s again...

[LostCluster]

It reminds me of a 1990s-era site called FreeRide which awarded "points" that were redeemable for prizes for visiting sponsor sites. It was even to the point that you could earn points for searching Google and other search engines, as they were even willing to pay per click back then.

Somehow, I don't think this is going to last very long. Anybody who's working on a Pay-Per-Click basis without a way to shut this kind of "unqualified lead" down is going to get wiped out very quickly...

Re:It's the 90s again...

[eclectro]

Somehow, I don't think this is going to last very long. Anybody who's working on a Pay-Per-Click basis without a way to shut this kind of "unqualified lead" down is going to get wiped out very quickly

They need to IP ban/blackhole India. Not only do they stop the fake clicking, but they bring back all the other jobs that were lost.

hey, I should get a patent on this.

Re:It's the 90s again...

[Hettch]

Hahaha, i totally remember that site, my friend got a free cd from CDNow, and i was envious and signed up. I got bored after a few weeks of clicking through monotonous ads though. It was basically the epitome of the dot.com pay-per-click era.

Re:It's the 90s again...

[no longer myself]

And it potentially closes another chapter in what looked to be a promising business model. Some sites rely completely on advertising for their upkeep. Without it, they're just a hobby.

Even though the idea is to use those non-American Indians as if they were somehow inferior, they are still humans and still have every bit the ability to identify and overcome computer automated Turing tests, so "unqualified leads" won't be so easily detected.

What a shame... Advertisers will realize they are being scammed, and potentially abandon the use of 3rd part websites since there would be no automated way to detect the difference between a human who's actaully interested and a human who'd just hired to look interested. (Yeah, they could try to see them via IP address blocks, but even a mildly talented troll can overcome this...)

I rather liked the idea that you could do what you enjoyed and have advertisers pay for it all. Now advertisers won't trust you because they think they're gonig to get burnt. It just goes to show you, any idiot can burn down a barn.

Re:It's the 90s again...

[JM Apocalypse]

Too late. I have already filed for a patent.

Re:It's the 90s again...

[Frizzle Fry]

since there would be no automated way to detect the difference between a human who's actaully interested and a human who'd just hired to look interested.

How about the fact that the uninterested folks never buy things? If they just switch to using pay-per-sale (or whatever it's called) rather than pay-per-click or pay-per-view, they won't get scammed

Re:It's the 90s again...

[chris_mahan]

Well, at least you don't have ADHD. You would have been bored of clicking after about 15 seconds. I don't knwo how you managed a few weeks.

Re:It's the 90s again...

[no longer myself]

Pay per sale would be nice, but it's not entirely a practical solution. Here's why:

Assume I'm honest and don't hire "Click Through Inflators (TM)", and I make a business deal to post XYZ's ad on my site. (Just play along... I don't have ads on my site.)

User N clicks on it and visits XYZ.

They look around, and are interested, but need time to think about it.

They bookmark the page, or just make a mental note of the site.

Now they close the browser, clear the cookies, terminate the connection, and go to bed...

A day or two later User N is still thinking about what (s)he saw.

They dial up their ISP, and type in the URI, Click the Bookmark, or just Google for the page.

Now they make the purchase, but my website is not going to be able to receive credit because the user's IP is dynamic, their cookies where munched by an anti-spyware program, and the method they used to return to the page was not through my site because my site would most likely rotate ads.

Now *I'm* the one getting ripped off. It was my bandwidth that introduced the customer to the seller, and I get *nothing* for it.

The business model fails because I have no incentive at all now to put their ad on my page knowing that I can only get paid if there is a definitive paper-trailed sale attributed to my site, and that can be rather difficult to impossible for me to prove if the sale isn't absolutely spontaineous. Just imagine the horror of a deal if the advertising site is actually a brick and mortor type of establishment. I can't wait for Taco Bell to post an ad banner on my page. YUM!

But if you're still sure about this, then I'll call my local TV station and ask them to show my ads, and I'll pay them according to my revenue. I'm sure they'll jump at the offer.

Re:It's the 90s again...

[FashionNugget]

It never really went away, that's the thing. There's still plenty of websites that pay members per click or signup or search, etc. Except these days, it's not so much points as straight up cash, which gets paypal'd directly to you. Sites like Quicker Clickers have massive followings amongst high school and college students around the world, and with a little bit of dedication, people still manage to make a good deal of money.
Meanwhile, FreeRide re-launched almost a year ago, but just hasn't been able to amass a userbase because of competition from sites like QuickerClickers. People prefer money to points, and long-drawn process to recieve gift certificates.

Re:It's the 90s again...

[Frizzle Fry]

These problems also exist with pay-per-click. For example, the point of a taco bell banner ad as the same as a tv ad or print ad-- to make you more likely to buy their food. The point is not (or not mainly) to make you visit the taco bell website. So you would also be getting "ripped off" today if you had a taco bell pay-per-click ad hosted on your site and people weren't clicking on it, but were still seeing it and buying more taco bell.

Just like people can bookmark a page after clicking on it and come back later to buy things (foiling pay-per-buy), they could see it and make a note to visit later, but not click on it (foiling pay-per-click). I might do this if I see an ad while on my computer at work and decide I'll go check it out when I get home.

Also, it shares the same problem as pay-per-click, which is that the hoster rather than the advertiser suffers if the advertiser creates a lousy ad that no one clicks on.

Re:It's the 90s again...

[no longer myself]

Which goes back to my OP, and the parent of my OP. Because of idiots exploiting the simplistic nature of the advertising model, the honest people will suffer, and everyone will lose in this issue of "Tragedy of the Commons Today".

Highering people (regardless of nationality) to click on your site's ads is akin to promising a company to hang their flyers on people's doors, but instead throwing them in the trash.

Perhaps the real solution is one that has existed in the real world all along. Simply investigate a prospective website before wasting your money trying to advertise on them. There's still a possibility of getting conned, but you'll find that in all aspects of life.

Shall we eat at the usual "Taco Bell" or "Akbars Taco Palace" in the abandoned gas station? Once you're sick of eating at T.B., you're going to be tempted to try Akbar's, but you'll most likely want to ask a few people if they've tried it, and your first visit will probably be more of a taste-test rather than a chummle-fest that could lead to uncertain disaster... You know how it goes.

What gets me is that making an honest living usually doesn't require any more effort than making a dishonest living, but people who use dishonesty in the hopes to get ahead only make it harder in the future for everyone including themselves because no one can trust anyone anymore.

"So come on down to Akbar's Taco Palace- 'It's a trap! (TM)'"

Re:It's the 90s again...

[tarunthegreat2]

Dear Sir, as an employee of the Patent Office of the United States of America, I regret to inform you that we cannot award you your patent, as we outsourced our patenting software/database/processes to India.

Better luck next time,

Outsou R. Ced

Re:It's the 90s again...

[JM Apocalypse]

Would you believe that this is the 3rd time this has happened to me?

make rupees fast!

[grub]

Why, type in 'earn rupees clicking ads' in Google? you get 25,000 results.

Swell, even AllAdvantage.com is outsourcing.

Yeah, I know their gone

Re:make rupees fast!

[Darthmalt]

Dont you know? Just go into the the room beside Hyrule's drawbridge and get all the rupee's out of the Jars.

Re:make rupees fast!

[P. Harmon Devin]

I tried this, and got:

Results 1 - 10 of about 3,260 for earn rupees clicking ads

Google only gave me 3,260 not 25,000 results.

Show me the Money

[stecoop]

Anyone have a Perl script to generate click throughs automatically - parse a set of pages of know web page add payers and generate hits while I'm sleeping? If so post it here and I'll split the profits with you. :-]

After that you'll need to gather a pool of developers on sourceforge for any would be counter measures that could be used by the click thorough payers. And who said that America is loosing its scientific talent.

Re:Show me the Money

[necro2607]

I remember on a Hotline server I used to hang out on, some guys wrote their own HTTP client programs to visit these click-through pages and they'd just leave the apps running while they went to work/school etc.

They actually had hand-coded apps for a few different pay-per-click companies and the programs actually worked.

I'm guessing they probably used proxies (Wingates most likely, back in the good ol' days when the broad existence of completely open proxies was newly discovered knowledge) so as to generate unique hits and whatnot.

I think they were written in RealBasic though, not perl.

Re:Show me the Money

[Neil Blender]

Anyone have a Perl script to generate click throughs automatically

#!/usr/bin/perl

while (1) {

my $a = int rand (255) + 1;
my $b = int rand (255) + 1;
my $c = int rand (255) + 1;
my $d = int rand (255) + 1;
`wget --referer-url=$a.$b.$c.$d http://whoever.com/ads`;

}

Re:Show me the Money

[TheRaven64]

No. This will set the referrer to a random IP, which is not at all what you want. You want the referrer to be a constant (since they're the one who gets paid), and the originating IP to change. This is probably possible by spoofing the from address in the packets, as long as the ad server doesn't notice that you're closing the connection as soon as it sends you any data (since you will not actually have a connected socket on the other end).

Re:Show me the Money

[Neil Blender]

No. This will set the referrer to a random IP

Yes, but you will pass something like ?yourid=234230840-29840239840298 in the url. If you put a banner on your website you want the clicks to be coming from different IPs. You aren't going to get credit by clicking your banner over and over again from the same IP. Uniques are what's important. As you say, ad servers do have some measure of intelligence.

Re:Show me the Money

[FictionPimp]

hmm, your on to something

we could write click though software and release it under another name, then write click though software detecting programs and sell it to companys. Then we could write anti-click though software detecting software. and anti anti anti...oh wait... :-)

Smile its a joke.

Re:Show me the Money

[budgenator]

start with

function log_adview ($bannerID, $clientID)
{
global $phpAds_log_adviews;
global $phpAds_tbl_banners;
global $phpAds_random_retrieve;
global $phpAds_zone_used;

// If sequential banner retrieval is used, set banner as "used"
if ($phpAds_random_retrieve > 0 && $phpAds_zone_used != true)
@db_query("UPDATE $phpAds_tbl_banners SET seq=seq-1 WHERE bannerID='$bannerID'");

if(!$phpAds_log_adviews)
return(false);

// Check if host is on list of hosts to ignore
if($host = phpads_ignore_host())
{
$res = @db_log_view($bannerID, $host);
phpAds_expire ($clientID, phpAds_Views);
}
}

What your not getting is you don't have to get that complicated

1. I get $7.95/mo website and install phpads
2. I Sell you my advertising service of 100K impressions for low price, I'm selling your banner to other sites.
3. I pay people to click on the banners, I pay them 1/4 of what you pay me to have them clicked
4. profit

It's an inside scam, and they are not hurt the big-boys cause the big-boys can serve their own ads. They hurting the little mom and pop type internet sites by blowing their advetising budget on bogus clicks. The worst part about it is the mom&pops can't realy do anything to me because I delivered what I promised, people clicking their ad banners and viewing their websites!

Conversions

[Neil Blender]

It's all about conversions. Bad CTR to conversion ratios will be noticed and addressed. Anyone who advertises online and does not monitor such stats is foolish.

Re:Conversions

[cmacb]

EXACTLY!

Funny how this follows on so close to the article about the BBC on-demand video experiment. The issue is the same, people are trying to impose old, outdated print media advertising concepts onto the Internet.

Click-throughs are (IMHO) a better measure of ad effectiveness than are the magazine subscription numbers (or Neilson ratings) by a long shot, but click-throughs are not perfect. What *IS* perfect is to measure how many people actually BUY the product being advertised.

This is conceptually quite easy to do. With each ad needs to come some sort of incentive, either to buy the product right now, while viewing the ad, or some sort of unique coupon number than will (for example) entitle the bearer to a discount when buying the product later. Even the print and TV advertisers figured this one out years ago. The Internet makes it much easier.

Stop measuring click-throughs and start measuring buy-throughs.

Great!

[Illuminati Member]

When I thought I was onto something I find my job is, once again, outsourced to India!!!
Perhaps I should work on plan B, clicking spam links to boost spammers confidence.

Acronym abuse

[Anonymous Coward]

WTF is CPC?

Re:Acronym abuse

[Anonymous Coward]

IIRC (IANAL), RTFA.

Re:Acronym abuse

[Anonymous Coward]

It's nowhere in the article. Anyway, I did a Google search and found it stands for Cost Per Click. Note to submitters: use the English language not marketing buzzterms in your stories. I don't care to google every friggin acronym in your poorly-written submittals.

hey guys...

[Anonymous Coward]

that is how slashdot makes money! do you really think, all those geeks are clicking ads?

Its a sad day

[Anonymous Coward]

When even punching the monkey gets outsourced.

Re:Its a sad day

[goldspider]

Let's not be hasty here.

I for one know that 'punching the monkey' is still very much a domestic function performed at the goldspider household.

Re:Its a sad day

[tgd]

There's this place down the road from me, I hear, where you can outsource punching the monkey.

Oh wait, you said punching. Nevermind.

Re:Its a sad day

[bl8n8r]

> When even punching the monkey gets outsourced.

It aint sad yet - wait till they outsource spanking it too.

Re:Its a sad day

[Anonymous Coward]

Ximian is even outsourcing the monkey spanking... their new logo features a monkey from India.

Re:Its a sad day

[Anonymous Coward]

They can outlaw punching him, but by god it will be a cold day in hell if they ever try to outsource spanking him ... ... then again ...

Re:Its a sad day

[Fez]

I earned about $250 worth of certificates from FreeRide.com, most of which were Amazon or CDNow certificates. Pretty much everyone in my office did it, we were that bored. It was how we started each morning.

Of course toward the end it got worse and worse, but they never did fix some security 'problems' that would let you get multiple clicks per ad. The system was setup to only allow you ~10 ad clicks per day in the main section, but depending on how fast a person could click, you could get from 2-50 + clicks registered off the right banners, preferably 10-point ones. You could get a $20 cert in a matter of days.

Of course that's probably why they went under... I still don't get how they really made money in the first place. I doubt they ever turned anything resembling a profit.

/Still wishing I hadn't used my real e-mail address to sign up for FreeRide...

Re:Its a sad day

[Anonymous Coward]

It aint sad yet - wait till they outsource spanking it too.

They'll have to pry it from my warm dead hand first!

Re:Its a sad day

[SEE]

Hey, I'd gladly outsource the job of spanking my monkey to a young Indian woman . . .

Re:Its a sad day

[phlack]

They didn't make money. That's why they went under.

Then resurfaced, then went under again. They're back once more; not sure how good of a deal it is...I get spammed from them because I was an original member (they can't seem to locate my account, but somehow I keep getting spam from them as if I were...go figure).

The first time they were alive (had a lot of employees, too), I made maybe a hundred or two out of them. Most of that was VC, though. The search engines they used (Lycos was one, I believe. Don't recall Google being one, as another poster mentioned, but it was a long time ago), which were the bulk of their revenue, refused to pay out. (search engines don't like incentivized clicks for obvious reasons) Freeride lost somewhere in the neighborhood of $500K because they already paid it out thanks to the VC!

Was fun while it lasted, though.

Re:Its a sad day

[dtfinch]

I won a Treeloot monkey once. Probably everyone who went there did. My cat loves it. It's barely recognizable now, and I have a rope tied to it so I can hang it from the ceiling and watch her jump up and hang from it as she rips the cotton out.

Re:Its a sad day

[aardvarko]

Why is this moderated "Informative"?? :-)

Re:Its a sad day

[NoYes19]

I agree sense when is someone saying they wqould higher a prostitute informative?!?

Re:Its a sad day

[linzeal]

Here, here. Just don't make me watch their damn movies, running through green fields again, "Why god, why?" Maybe if I asked it as "Why many gods, goddesses, talking animals, and such, oh why?" I could get a decent response. Indian females have lucious skin though. Damn making me miss a girl I dated in High School, heh.

Re:Its a sad day

[SuperSnooper]

Slashdot, wonderful slashdot....where else would the parent post be called "informative"?

Ive heard of this in the states

[Anonymous Coward]

I was looking to start up a business a few years ago. Small comic/anime/geek store front. Nothing major. Pretty straightforward stuff.

One of the guys who was interested in investing in my little shop job had this scam running as a full time job. Seriously. Him, and a handful of people would click on ads all day, and get checks for it.

While I dont remember the specifics, I recall thinking very little of this individual, and not going into business with him. Or anyone else for that matter.

Im now a salaryman. I hate it. Someone help me escape from this repetative go-nowhere job hell.

Re:Ive heard of this in the states

[Anonymous Coward]

I recall thinking very little of this individual, and not going into business with him

Little did you now that he would become the CEO of SCO and would just be a salaryman..

Re:Ive heard of this in the states

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, at least my grammar doesnt suck.

People are always ready to toss money on ads

[SatanicPuppy]

Ever buy the Sunday paper? First thing you do is dump the 8 pounds of glossy color ads in the nearest garbage can. Everyone knows this, but the advertisers still line up every week to pay for their ads to end up in a landfill.

The same is true with internet ads...They have to pay by click or view or something. There isn't any way around it, that's how all adds are sold.

At least we've finally outsourced a crappy job.

Re:People are always ready to toss money on ads

[Anonymous Coward]

You may dump them in the trash, but those adds are all my wife reads...

Re:People are always ready to toss money on ads

[bludstone]

Coupon Clipper-type people foam at the mouth over those sunday ads.

Really.

Re:People are always ready to toss money on ads

[Blaubart]

"The same is true with internet ads..."

Not in all cases...Sometimes advertisers just pay to have their ad appear on a prominent section of a popular page. They know the ad will be seen by tons of people and have paid for just that.

In these cases, the only thing clicks would do is eat up the advertiser's bandwidth... Hrmmm...Is that a bad thing?

Re:People are always ready to toss money on ads

[DR SoB]

Outsourced a crappy job? Have you ever met a professional "ad-clicker?" Or even someone that claims to do part-time "ad-clicking"??

Re:People are always ready to toss money on ads

[Anonymous Coward]

First thing you do is dump the 8 pounds of glossy color ads in the nearest garbage can.

Dude, you're missing out on the scantily clad women. It's like free pr0n.

Re:People are always ready to toss money on ads

[clichekiller]

My wife is one of those coupon clippers, she manages to save about $30.00 a month for maybe an hours work total. That's not bad.

Hell I even go through the techie adds, Best Buy, CompUSA, Circuit City, et. al. to see if they have any good deals for the week. I've picked up many a computer game for $30 bucks that's retailling at the other outlets for $40 or more. So don't discount the sunday paper.

Re:People are always ready to toss money on ads

[Anonymous Coward]

First thing you do is dump the 8 pounds of glossy color ads in the nearest garbage can.

You don't pull out the ads for CompUSA, BestBuy, OfficeMax, Staples, etc. I check those every week. Lots of great deals.

They wouldn't spend money on those ads if they didn't work. First thing I toss is the sports section. I'm a nerd.

Re:People are always ready to toss money on ads

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you kidding? The ads sell more Sunday Papers than the news does. They even have a special "Friday Edition" around here with all the ads & features and no news.

Re:People are always ready to toss money on ads

[monkeyfamily]

A few years ago, CompUSA's circular mistakenly advertised the super-deluxe, voice recognizing, dictionary-and-thesaurus-included version of the World Book encyclopedia for $30 when they intended to sell the cheapo version at that price. Now, these encyclopedias had also been stickered with manufacturer's rebates worth $50 (deluxe) and $20 (stripped down). So whaddayaknow, I ended up ahead ahead a fancy encyclopedia that reads me the articles if I tell it to, and twenty bucks (less sales tax) to boot! A year later that CompUSA went out of business. That shop always seemed like they didn't know what they were doing in computers

Re:People are always ready to toss money on ads

[dcocos]

First thing you do is dump the 8 pounds of glossy color ads in the nearest garbage can.

Actually the ads are the part of the paper where I find the least amount of lies :-) I usually pull out the glossy part and throw away the rest.

Re:People are always ready to toss money on ads

[Anonymous Coward]

You may want to toss those techie ads too for this.

In India...

[Camel Pilot]

Perhaps in India people are cheaper than a script sufficeintly sophisticated to slip thru the "Click Protection" of PPC advertisers.

Mind you Overtures' Click Protection leaves a lot to desired.

Re:In India...

[kevlar]

Thats just a silly statement. "Click Protection" is merely a matter of throwing away cookies and sessions and changing the User-Agent string to be a valid browser.

All those things you can do with wget.

I think they're probably doing this for legal reaons since they are real-life humans clicking on each link... so that they don't get sued or brought up on fraud charges for "enhancing" their click count.

Re:In India...

[Camel Pilot]

I know they look for IP address. Overture claims they examine 40 different connection parameters.

Re:In India...

[shird]

They also do a lookup to see if it is a known proxy, plus some 'smart' detection to see if its a proxy. Plus they check trends and all sorts of other stuff to try detect abuse. Otherwise, they would all be out of businesss.

Its quite difficult to get lots of unique IP address to register a click from. (without open proxies). But yeah, a script running from many different IPs would be the same as a person 'running' from many different IPs. But perhaps they use people cause that way they can actually 'hire' ip addresses, rather than the people themselves.

Reminds me of that program ppl used to run which displayed ads and you got paid for it. People would run all sorts of mouse-moving bots to keep the ads running overnight. Nowadays, the spyware crap has replaced that, and the 'victims' get nothing in return.

Ethics

[gcaseye6677]

An Indian advertising executive quoted in the article feels that this practice of making a lot of money clicking on ads is unethical. Why? The people are being paid to do exactly what they are doing. The ones interviewed for this article were not using any kind of script or other automated click simulator. This is the downside of massive, untargeted advertising. You never know who you're going to reach or if your message is the slightest bit effective.

Of course they don't sit there clicking

[empaler]

on one computer at a time.
They've installed remote desktop systems so that they can control five computers at a time, duh.

Cue Simpsons

[tcopeland]

Lisa: Shouldn't you be working?
Homer: I've got someone to cover for me.
[Camera shows drinking bird repeatedly pressing 'Y' on the keyboard.]

Thanks to SNPP.

Re:Cue Simpsons

[thebra]

Great episode, homer gets fat so he can work at home and drink lemonade and beer.

Re:Cue Simpsons

[Throtex]

and TAB.

Re:Cue Simpsons

[Evil-G]

I don't think pressing the tab key actually yields a can of tab though... haven't tried it in a while but I'm pretty sure that's the way it is still.

Where is the money coming from?

[Ra5pu7in]

Advertisers? Definitely won't last long. Marketing loves to spend money on new ideas, but any business that lets them run amok without any cost to results will go bankrupt.

I wonder if this click-happy group also clicks on virus-laden emails. To me, that would be far more frightening -- hundreds of thousands of infected machines in India pouring spam through a multitude of ISPs. Yuck.

Re:Where is the money coming from?

[Gwenna]

Advertisers? Definitely won't last long. Marketing loves to spend money on new ideas, but any business that lets them run amok without any cost to results will go bankrupt.

So does mean the demise of big annoying adverts on every webpage?

Re:Where is the money coming from?

[Ra5pu7in]

Unfortunately no, because they get enough clickers who buy to show value. These ones that pay just to click (with no cash return) are fly-by-night because nothing comes in to pay for them.

Current Codes?

[guinsu]

WTF does that have to do with your story? Sounds like someone just wanted to drive extra traffic to their deal site with an unrelated link in the story.

your next job

[happyfrogcow]

will be to move this pile of rocks to that corner of the room. When you are done, report to me for your next assignment which will involve one of the other three corners of the room, and a similar pile of rocks. at the end of the day, report how many piles of rocks you set up, and how many piles of rocks you moved.

Stupid Interweb.

Re:your next job

[naxi]

don't forget to tunnel through this mountain using a needle, move the water in this full well to that dry one using an eyedropper, and move this other mountain somewhere over there using a pair of tweezers (anyone else read The Phantom Tollbooth as a kid?)

Re:your next job

[Anonymous Coward]

I loved the Phantom Tollbooth! You sir, rock.

Re:your next job

[name773]

one of my favourite books.
i was thinking the same thing too :)
the AC who replied to you has it right

Silly observation

[Talence]

So when I read "rakshit says new tech solutions are... etc", I thought they meant "RackShack" (now ev1) and someone pranked them into misspelling it.

Who normally signs up for these things ANYWAY??

[DR SoB]

This is going to put every bored "home-maker" out of work... oh right..

So 90

[hermeshome.se]

The 90's called, they want their clicks back.

Re:So 90

[csnydermvpsoft]

The 80's called, they want their saying back.

Re:So 90

[Anonymous Coward]

The 70's called, they want their attitude back.

Shell script

[Anonymous Coward]

Seems relevant

Re:Shell script

[Anonymous Coward]

While we're at it, would someone please go there and define what exactly "on teh spoke" means? Thanks!!

Clicking? Bah!

[flashbang]

I just forward that email from Microsoft and AOL, I'm told that I'll get tons of money very soon.. Silly people actually clicking on ads for money..

This could be good

[Anonymous Coward]

So if people are abusing CPC ads to get more money, that means the advertiser is paying more and getting less real exposure. Theoritically they would see this on thier bottom line.

If this continues then what exactly happens? I figure 2 possible scenarios:

1. Do advertisers realize that cost per click just isn't worth it and go to another model?
-Or-
2.Do they realize that banner ads aren't an effective medium, and we see a decrease of banner ads instead?

Re:This could be good

[Number_1_Bigg$]

2.Do they realize that banner ads aren't an effective medium, and we see a decrease of banner ads instead?

Yes, they will see that banner ads don't work an move on to the next most annoying thing in the universe, pop-up ads.

Be careful what you wish for...

Re:This could be good

[Anonymous Coward]

Go to www.overture.com, search for "bulk email" and start clicking. Every click means some bastard selling spamming software/lists will have to pay for the click.
(see the info on "sponsored links". I notice they've stopped showing how much each link you click will cost the advertiser. Pity..)

How silly!

[thebra]

I can see it now.. "Well Jim it appears most people interseted in buying *insert product* are from India. Let's focus our advertising there."

Back in the boom days...

[ElGuapoGolf]

My old company, MarketSource, used to run this website called Ontap.com, which was billed as "the place where college students live online". (Yeah, I know that if you go there now it's a liquor distributor or somesuch, which is actually closer to what college students actually do, but I digress..)

Anyhow, the management had this notion that they could pay for everything with online advertising. Who wouldn't want to run ads aimed at the very lucrative college crowd? And we were paid per ad impression!

Of course, the money coming in wasn't as much as was hoped for by management. Trouble was, nobody was visiting the site. So someone came up with the bright idea of refreshing ads every 30 seconds or so. Which also led to the plea from management to "leave your computer on 24/7 with your browser opened to our site". Kinda like using a thimble to bail out the Titanic, but hey....

This also led to discussion where management would say things like, "We need to make X new feature as complicated as possible... instead of doing it in 3 pages, let's do it in 7 cos then we'll serve more ads".

The only good thing that ever came out of that site was the fact we sent a famous midget (Verne Troyer) off to some 17 year old girl's prom. I hope he didn't hump her like he did the laser in APII.

Re:Back in the boom days...

[Spoing]

1. This also led to discussion where management would say things like, "We need to make X new feature as complicated as possible... instead of doing it in 3 pages, let's do it in 7 cos then we'll serve more ads".

I'm curious. What is it like working at Tom's Hardware these days?

do the math

[Avishalom]

Tourists can live pretty good on 10$ (US) per day.
(and that's when you get ripped off for everything)

for a local vilaager (forgive PCness, lack of) half that amount is hansome.
I guess that someday the bottom will drop out.
but untill that day , some money can change hands from some corporations to some people who truely deserve it (i figure if i were 12, i'd be willing to sit for three hours , opening and closing tabs(firefox) for ~10,000 clicks )
(I guess these sites can prevent scripts, otherwise we'd all be a part of such schemes)
great now we have internet sweat shops

Re:do the math

[Anonymous Coward]

At $10/day it will take a while to pay for the computer, electricity and bandwidth before you can turn a profit.

Re:do the math

[potat0man]

some money can change hands from some corporations to some people who truely deserve it (i figure if i were 12, i'd be willing to sit for three hours , opening and closing tabs(firefox) for ~10,000 clicks )

So a 12 year old wasting hours on a computer clicking things, producing nothing for his efforts that betters the world deserves the money more than a corporation? A corporation that employs people building things and making things easier for everyone and increasing the GDP of whatever country their in as well as, of course, the GDP of the entire world.

This clicking is like gambling (not that they're not essentially guaranteed their money, but) in that, sure, they may gain some personal wealth from it, but they produce nothing for society.

4 out of 5 businesses fail. How many businesses are successful enough to become mega-corps? I bet it's in the area of 1 in 1,000 or 1 in 10,000. With those kinds of risks, these guys deserve the rewards from their hard work, producing something that lasts and makes products we all, obviously (due to their success), enjoy.

I can't stand this view that poor people, because they are poor, are somehow righteous. Some are in tough economic environments. Some are unlucky. And some are lazy. None of which make them more deserving. Perhaps of our pity, but not our dollars.

Inefficient...

[CODiNE]

They should just rent virus infected computers from the mob and set them to click at random intervals. Or maybe that's what they are being used for... besides DDoS that is.

-Don.

Re:Inefficient...

[masternerd]

You can easily detect where click is coming from based on IP address. So if they are clicking from India, companies here would not pay. But I am sure there may be holes there too.
You have brought a good news though. It will make companies here catious to pay yahoo or google money that would never generate any revenue.

A good reason for CPA

[mcguyver]

This has always been a problem with CPC long before google rolled out adsense/adwords. CPC fraud is a good reason to use CPA. However tracking sales is a complex process. I'm sure google like the simplicity of CPC, so long as they can skate these fraud issue.

Perl script jobs being outsourced!

[Kaa]

It seems that not only human jobs are outsourced to India, but Perl script jobs as well.

Next time one of my Perl programs starts giving me problems I'll tell it to behave or it'll get replaced by an Indian worker.

Seems like the classic "Go away or I'll replace you with a very small shell script" T-shirt now gets a sequel!

Re:Perl script jobs being outsourced!

[skurk]

Running a little offtopic here, just thought of something while I read 'perl' and 'indian' in the same article:

A few months ago I was hired through RentACoder to fix some buggy perl scripts on a server that were developed by several indian developers (outsourcing).

Seriously, it was the worst piece of crap I've ever seen. I can write cleaner and more efficient code while fighting rabid dogs on crack.

I'm sure that doesn't represent the code that your average Joe Ghandi will write, but it was a good lesson to mr.Fat Wallet that the cheapest outsourced solution isn't always the best choice.

Re:Perl script jobs being outsourced!

[t_allardyce]

Nah its the new trend in 'streamlining efficient solutions' - you pay the worst and cheapest programmer you can find and aslong as they actually write something that roughly fits the specs you use it. If you find the code is actually a pile of spagetti (spelling?) then you get someone like you to fix it. Just make sure you dont take a look at all their other scripts or you'll faint. Its a big fat accident waiting to happen, but while it works, it saves money.

Just be glad this sort of thing is only done with semi-important systems like banking and voting - you just wait until planes and nuclear reactors get outsourced to the cheapest bidder, then you really will be fighting rabid crack whores! we all will!

Re:Perl script jobs being outsourced!

[cyphergirl]

"Just be glad this sort of thing is only done with semi-important systems like banking and voting - you just wait until planes and nuclear reactors get outsourced to the cheapest bidder, then you really will be fighting rabid crack whores! we all will!"

I've got news for you. Testing and some bug fixes of avionics software are already being sent to India.

Re:Perl script jobs being outsourced!

[t_allardyce]

Well that could still mean one of 3 things:

1) they used the crapest cheapest programmers they could find: we're all screwed

2) they used the most expensive but still crap programmers: we're still screwed but now with less money

3) they found some decent programmers: we're ok, but if the middle managers ever find out they spent good hooker money on programmers they'll be pissed!

Re:Perl script jobs being outsourced!

[phaze3000]

Seriously, it was the worst piece of crap I've ever seen. I can write cleaner and more efficient code while fighting rabid dogs on crack.

Is that whilst you're on crack, or the dogs?

You want to be careful giving dogs crack, you'll get the PETA people on to you. Believe me, I should know.

As an Indian, I tell you...

[bluenote39]

You should be wary of anything Times of India reports. Once a premier newspaper, it has reduced to a tabloid and semi porn website now.

Case in point, assuming you get paid $0.25 per click as the article reports, that amounts to $180 an hour (assuming you click 1 ad per 5 seconds)!! Thats insane, even by american standards. In India where a average guy gets $300 a month salary, that figure is damn near impossible.

Re:As an Indian, I tell you...

[Petronius]

the article mentions that you have to stay on the page for ~60 seconds.

Re:As an Indian, I tell you...

[bluenote39]

The article mentions that you have to stay on the page for ~60 seconds. Tabbed browsing.

Re:As an Indian, I tell you...

[farzadb82]

I guess they'd need the $180/hour just to pay for their internet connection!

Seriously, like you I cannot understand how this is physically possible! - even with cable, clicking on various links takes atleast a few seconds, unless you are the only one visiting the site at the time(unlikely).

Re:As an Indian, I tell you...

[MoonBuggy]

The article also assumes, however, that you must browse the advertised site for 90+ seconds to qualify a proper 'click through'.

Re:As an Indian, I tell you...

[eclectro]

Thats insane, even by american standards. In India where a average guy gets $300 a month salary, that figure is damn near impossible.

Sounds like you tried pretty hard though.

Re:As an Indian, I tell you...

[boinger]

Even MSIE can manage multiple windows.

Re:As an Indian, I tell you...

[Graphyx]

You could just get mozilla to open the pages in another tab and let them sit there. Then close them all out in a minute.
That won't slow you down at all.

Re:As an Indian, I tell you...

[ek-1000-ek]

We call Times of India, Toilet Paper of India. It is a very old news paper but in recent years have degraded into tabloid standard and pop culture promoter. Haven't read anything sensible or serious for a long time.

Re:As an Indian, I tell you...

[Anonymous Coward]

You should be wary of anything Times of India reports. Once a premier newspaper, it has reduced to a tabloid and semi porn website now.


I finally have a reason to check on india news now.

Re:As an Indian, I tell you...

[Anonymous Coward]

Is times of india owned by NewsCorp (owners of Times of London, NY Post, Boston Herald, Fox News, and other shovelers of s%$*)?

Re:As an Indian, I tell you...

[poot_rootbeer]

the article mentions that you have to stay on the page for ~60 seconds.

How is this measured? HTTP is stateless.

Re:As an Indian, I tell you...

[Petronius]

I'm guessing there's an HTML redirect (pragma http-equiv) in the page that sends you to a second page that validates that you stayed on the first one and 'read' the add. I'm *guessing*. (this would easily be defeated by a script, unless they do some crazy shit with client-side Javascript, cookies, etc.)
Or the article is complete crap. Which could be too.

Re:As an Indian, I tell you...

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey, I'm being paid .25 per minute!

(whether or not I'm actually DOING anything)

= 15.00/hr * 8hrs = $120/day

- a computer operator in the DC area...

Re:As an Indian, I tell you...

[ashayh]

Once a premier newspaper, it has reduced to a tabloid and semi porn website now.
That is so true. Semi-porn is exactly what I call it. I stopped going there (and reading the paper) a while ago.
I prefer the Indian Express.

What would be really funny

[Anonymous Coward]

is if they were sitting around on /. clicking all those VA software ads about offshoring. Just helping the local economy along with yourself!

Google results

[Anonymous Coward]

here.

I'm going one step beyond this

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm putting tiny little electrical generators in each mouse, and generating electricity with each click. One hundred million Indians clicking at the same time should be enough to power Toledo.

Re:I'm going one step beyond this

[Anonymous Coward]

One hundred million Indians clicking at the same time

If you dream that one in 10 Indians owns a PC, you're in for a rude shock.

Been wanting to say this for days....

[AvantLegion]

When I thought I was onto something I find my job is, once again, outsourced to India!!!

DEY TOOK AHR JAHBS!!

Re:Been wanting to say this for days....

[Anonymous Coward]

GETS TAH BRAINS MORANS!

Re:Been wanting to say this for days....

[Marx_Mrvelous]

DIRK-A DOO!

Re:Been wanting to say this for days....

[SnowDeath]

They came from the future and took our Jahrubs! Those Goo-backs!

Re:Been wanting to say this for days....

[SLot]

DEY TOOK AHR JAHBS!! Quick - back into the pile!!!

Re:Been wanting to say this for days....

[GrassMunk]

DEY TOOK YERH JAHWBS

Re:Been wanting to say this for days....

[DeionXxX]

For those of you that don't get it, its a reference to the latest South Park episode where people from the future come to South Park and offer to work for pennies on the dollar. There's a whole bunch of red-necks that get together and say "They took our jobs" in various redneck ways.

Quite funny, even though I swear they were making fun of Indians and not Mexicans at first. You know... coding PHP/Java for $5/hr.

THAY TOOK MY JAWB!!!

Re:Been wanting to say this for days....

[bthomp]

"Wait... wait... this is more gay than a bunch of men humping each other."

"Back to the pile!"

Re:Been wanting to say this for days....

[linzeal]

Oh my god the humanity!

What is up with the infatuation those southpark people have with homosexual solutions to non-sexual problems? Such as public transportation, in the form of a dildo powered bike and this latest one are the most blatent.

Maybe they just have a large latent homosexual crowd watching them, maybe it is just good marketing?

Ahh, the good ol' days of getting $$ from clicks..

[DroopyStonx]

Used to run a warez FTP in IRC back in the day.

Had the ol' "To get into my site, visit this URL [url to paying click site] and search for "shampoo". The first word of the second paragraph + the third word of the fouth paragraph of the first item listed is the password to get in."

I'd rack up like $100 a week for like 2 months. I couldn't believe it worked, but looking back on it, it's unbelievable I never got caught.

How do we suggest ads to be clicked?

[bagsc]

I've got a great new idea of how to destroy Microsoft's marketing budget...

ohhohoho !

[dindi]

I use PPC (pay-per-click) advertising to some of my sites/projects, and yes, I hade to waste some hundred $$ before I knwe where to advertise ...

Lots of PPC companies have affiliate programs and some lowlifes are running "get paid to surf" programs. You have to go to sites, and sign up, or just click the ads and receive a % of the click.

Also there are the clickbots, which are created to generate hundreds of clicks (and no sales of course) on the competitions's ads, until they give up ads.

Newver run expensive ads, especially not on ad networks other than google, overture and pageseeker ....

I do not want to get into trouble, so I better do not mention the ones that RIP you off badly .. bringing completely useless traffic in exchange for your $$.

(just to make it more clear, someone comes from a search for "cheap bikini" and leaves the site clicking on "men's socks" , and hundreds fo these under each other from the same PPC engine)

I especially pick on one, the letter "K" company with the chineise kind of pasta in it's name ...

or better yet....

[Anonymous Coward]

The army of shills paid by various megacorporations and other 'interests' to sit and make postings to various message boards. Some may be familiar with a similiar tactic known as astroturf'ing......

Can I subcontract the work?

[Danathar]

If I took the job, could I sub-contract it to my little brother and just give him a small cut? Then I could sit back and watch the $$$ roll in!

Too late

[nizo]

I told all you ad-clickers out there to unionize but now it is too late. All you shoe shiners and bootlickers better watch out, or the next thing you know they will be shipping your boss' shoes to India! Unionized now before it is too late!!!

Re:Darn MMORPGs!

[Tackhead]

> You think that's bad, I spent 2 months building a robot and then 2 months training it to be my Ad-Clicking replacement!

You think that's bad? I spent $49.99 plus $15/month for a subscription to Star Wars Galaxies and Evercrack. And that's on top of the $1.00/day I pay the Indians to mindlessly click the mouse button and grind out the characters and camp the spawns for the gold I sell on eBay.

Ah, I love the 'net and how it lets anyone out the middleman! I mean, by using banner ads, I can cut out 90% of my cost overhead by doing away with the MMORPG part of the business plan altogether. Stupid MMORPGs!

This is almost as senseless as a Wired article

[finnhart]

Can no one else smell the BS? This is almost as stupid as when Wired's "jargonwatch" claimed that people all over the US were saying "jithead".

Who is paying 25 cents per click? With programmers at WiPro earning, say, $1000 US per month .. that's just 4,000 clicks, or 150 per day. Right.

The article's claim that searching for earn rupees clicking ads returns 25,000 results is off by a factor of 10.

And, finally, it's "CPM", not "CPC".

Re:This is almost as senseless as a Wired article

[dindi]

Who is paying 25 cents per click?

If you ran adsense on any of your sites, you might have known, that there are clicks that cost the advertiser $4-$5 bucks or sometimes even more.

If you have an adwords account try to bid on the keyword "debt consolidation" or "viagra"
and you will realise, that with a 2 dollar bid you are nowhere near the 3 first pages !

PPC is expensive in the credit card/debt/financial stuff market and super-high in the online pharmacy business ...

Re:This is almost as senseless as a Wired article

[poot_rootbeer]

And, finally, it's "CPM", not "CPC".

Only in Marketing could you find people clueless enough to abbreviate "cost per thousand" as "CPM"...

Re:This is almost as senseless as a Wired article

[don.g]

I saw it explained once as "Cost Per thousand iMpressions", which is kind of like calling a somewhat expensive disk interface MOUSE - "sMall cOmpUter Systems intErface". Prehaps they wanted it to sound like "RPM" or something.

Re:This is almost as senseless as a Wired article

[Anonymous Coward]

Cost Per Mille.

Its french and came from a former french form of advertising. Thus Mille = 1000 French.

How many abreviations that make no fucking sense in other languages do you see used in their standard English form?

Quite a few. I work with a few indians that say things like LOL or other chat related lingo and have no fucking clue what they mean. They think its english for Haw Haw.

Only on Slashdot would you find someone so clueless as to believe all languages center around English.

Re:This is almost as senseless as a Wired article

[NewtonsLaw]

Why?

M is the roman numeral for a thousand and we all know that the romans started the current advertising craze.

Apparently The Coliseum was liberally plastered with Nike and Adidas banners (along with the blood of assorted Christians and petty criminals :-)

Re:This is almost as senseless as a Wired article

[Anonymous Coward]

Informative? They are talking about Cost Per Click (CPC), not CPM which is usually used to measure impressions in units of 1000 (.05 CPM = .05 per 1000 impressions).

Re:This is almost as senseless as a Wired article

[drew]

Actually, CPC is right. There are a couple of different metrics for pricing internet advertising. The most common ones are:

• CPM - Cost Per (M)1000* impressions
  
• CPC - Cost Per Click
  
• CPA - Cost Per Acquisition(?)
  

Not many people do CPM anymore, but it was popular back in the ".com era". CPA is the method most liked by people buying the advertisements- they only have to pay for the ads when they actually sell something. Of course it's also not too common because the company delivering the advertisements needs a way to know when the advertiser sold something in order to not get screwed.

which leaves us with CPC as the most popular payment method for internet advertisements. and as somebody else pointed out, the going rate for CPC last i checked is about $1-$2.50, and may be higher now.

*I had always assumed the M in CPM was related to the roman numeral M. But apparently according to one of the other posters, CPM is derived from a French word whose use in advertising predates the internet...

Re:This is almost as senseless as a Wired article

[cyberformer]

Well, the French word is derived from Latin, so technically is related to the roman numeral M.

Re:This is almost as senseless as a Wired article

[FashionNugget]

There are still plenty of sites out there that pay members per click (regardless ofwhere they're located). But you're right- the payout isn't nearly as high. The standard these days is closer to a fraction of a cent or so, see Quicker Clickers for example.

Re:This is almost as senseless as a Wired article

[mahbidness]

Ok, in case anyone else was morbidly curious:

Jithead: An international transportation term used to describe people who order goods on a "just in time" basis and then freak out when told that they didn't order early enough.
"That jithead should have placed his order a month ago."

link

Re:This is almost as senseless as a Wired article

[bezuwork's friend]

Jithead: An international transportation term ...

That's funny. Sounds professional. I guess it should be included in the definitions sections of business / international business legislation - the UCC, INCOTERMS, etc.

You know, so businesses would know to identify the consignee on a Bill of Lading as John Public, a jithead ...

Re:What's the name of this site?

[kfg]

And here I thought it was because we are the computer Brahmins.

KFG

How long till 419 scams get outsourced to India?

[Stavr0]

Oops. Too late.

Web advertising will become like TV advertising

[Ars-Fartsica]

"We don't know if it works, but we know we're screwed if we don't do it".

Maybe this is why...

[Audacious]

...those Ad people think their ads really are reaching people.

In Other News...

[jetkust]

In a quest for more clicks, and to get rid of the middleman, penis enlargement firms begin hiring paid clickers on site.

Mr. Smith from ManGro Technologies explains, "Since the clicks will be coming directly from our own servers we save on bandwidth, and at the same time oversee the entire clicking process, effectively paying substantially less for each click".

According to industry estimates, 1 out of 100 clicks is a buy. "Basically Increasing clicks, means increasing business.", Mr. Smith adds, "As well as the size of your penis."

Re:In Other News...

[AirDave]

Shouldn't that be Mr. Johnson, from ManGro...

Re:Darn Identity Thieves!

[plover]

"A girl robot!

This is going to be the best prom ever!"

Hopefully..

[andy1307]

that means the advertiser is paying more and getting less real exposure.

hopefully they are advertisers for products usually sold in spam(large johnson etc.). This should really hurt their bottom line.

4. Profit$$

[The-Dalai-LLama]

The pay per click ads are just the warm-up.

What they're really banking on is damages awarded for their carpal tunnel syndrome lawsuits.

The Dalai LLama
...damn, we're outsourcing SCO's gig...

I did something like this before

[kyoko21]

We did this when I used to work for a LARGE online ad-delivery company. The company is still around. We did it not because the company asked us to, but we did it just to see what would happen if one browser with 13 iframes were trying to refresh every all each 13 iframes every 5 seconds. :P Needless to say, we had 8 web browsers, each with 13 iframes and all refreshing... it was quite interesting... lol :-)

weird

[minus_273]

most systems filter by IP to certain countires only (i dont think india is a big market) on top of that there are ways to make sure the click is unique ... like hashs of random hardware serials..

Re:weird

[SomeOtherGuy]

They most likely have them going through a proxy located in the US. (Or a variety of proxies set up in other countries also.)

Re:weird

[karmatic]

Access to hardware serial numbers can only be accomplished reliably using things like plugins and ActiveX. Besides the security implications, the long download time, the inability to target non-windows platforms, and the added cost involved, the installation dialogs can scare off some of the clueless masses, precisely the people they are trying to target.

Re:weird

[minus_273]

no one cares about non windows users (its a fact). two i'm not proposing this as a theory, i know this is how its done in all the big companies.

Goutam Rakshit, chairman, Advertising Co...

[Anonymous Coward]

Goutam Rakshit, chairman, Advertising Council of India

nice name

The system can easily be fixed

[penguinoid]

So, what would be so hard about linking the credit card info page with the clicked-from page?

Why bother paying to outsource this

[cylcyl]

When you get it free just by posting the link on slashdot?

why not created a distributed network of clickers

[bergeron76]

Someone should create a distributed client (like SETI@home or something) that sends "clicks" to these places and cuts the person a portion of the payments in the form of micropayments or something.

As for India doing this en-masse - let them. If they want to enter a dot-com boom like the US/Europe had in the 90's, let them learn the hard way. I think I'll open an investment account in India and I'll buy low and sell high again. This time, however, I'll be sure to bail early on and not ride the wave up to $100/per share stocks for things like furniture.com.

In this way, they can have my outsourced job, and I can profit from it by being a Day Trader all over again.

Woo hoo!

I bought the paper for those glossy ads

[Wokan]

My wife has me pick up the Sunday paper for the coupons. The news gets dumped in the trash because we read it online already.

Re:I bought the paper for those glossy ads

[bbdd]

my wife is the same way. she chucks the "news" (which is old, anyway, by the time it gets printed in dead-tree form).

she then uses the grocery game to maximize the savings. seems to work great if you don't mind buying some products in bulk.

Re:I bought the paper for those glossy ads

[Anonymous Coward]

My wife has me pick up the Sunday paper for the coupons.

Do you also drive to 8 stores with your coupons to save $8?

Smart, burning gas, exposing yourself (and others) to traffic danger -- all to save a few nickels on toilet paper? Are you people for real?

I look at those ads -- willingly, & buy stuff,

[swb]

I mean, I buy stuff, too, and the Sunday inserts are a great way to check prices on stuff, and see what's generally on sale or otherwise discounted.

I'm as anti-advertising as the next guy, but this is the best kind of advertising -- I can opt-in if I want to, they print prices, have pictures, you can comparison shop on a lot of things, no cookies, spyware, sales associates or other annoyances.

If only all commerce was this enjoyable.

Click here instead :-P

[Jugalator]

http://www.thehungersite.com/cgi-bin/WebObjects/CT DSites

I'm sure there are other sites like that too.

(go here if you like animals more than people... lol)

Someone did that to us

[JimmytheGeek]

A pc was loading a web bug through 1200 caching servers, apparenty using them to generate ad hits.

Re:Ahh, the good ol' days of getting $$ from click

[necro2607]

Yeah, back in 1999 until recently that was pretty much standard on Hotline servers... it got to the point though where server admins were making it like "go to [this page] and [whatever word] is the first half of the login, [whatever word] on [this page] is the second half, [some other word] on [this page] is the first half of the password".... etc. etc. to the point where you'd be clicking 4 or more of this guy's banners to get in. Then they'd change the fuckin words weekly or daily to force users to keep clicking the banners all the time.

Luckily someone found a bug in the Windows HL server which allowed malicious users to gain full and essentially unrestricted access to the server's drives (as long as you had an account with upload/download). You could upload a shortcut (.lnk) file to their C drive or whatever drive you wanted (had to be uploaded with a non-Windows OS/client), download the admin's userdata from the server folder, decrypt the password, and yeah, there you go.

So some friends and I used to go around and fuck up these servers by renaming folders, making hundreds of bogus folders, renaming the server directory so no one could connect, etc. and depending on the severity of the admin's asshole-ness, erase all the user accounts and news and so on.

Nowadays I wouldn't do that, but I was a pissed off teenager and I was glad to destroy something that I felt was morally wrong or at least somewhat on the shady/dishonest side of things...

Who pays for THIRD WORLD clicks?

[Anonymous Coward]

Does someone really pay for clicks from THIRD WORLD IP addresses? Or are the Indians using proxies in the US/Europe?

Outsourcing...

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey Indian ad clickers, your jobs are moving to Haiti. Back to the dole for you!

Take away their computers.

[ultrasonik]

That's it. Time to take away all of India's computers. All they do is sit around all day trying to make something for nothing on the internet, provide crappy tech support, and pirate Microsoft software and copyrighted music and movies. No wait... that's what I do all day : /

Pretend you're a proxy.

[Ayanami Rei]

Set an X-Forwarded-For: some.ip.add.ress header. I think some of the more advanced ad servers will honor that.
Also make sure to find a URL that will give you a new session key if you pretend you don't have one, and use that for a bunch of ads on the same network. This makes it look like a "person" viewing those ads over time. Expire the session keys after a day or two using the script (maybe use the cookie's expiry instead)

Re:Darn MMORPGs!

[Walkiry]

You do realize you've just given some people an excellent idea, don't you?

Why do you even need a person?

[Cyberllama]

How hard would it be to write a program to do this? Hell, you could make one using AutoIT. Seems kinda silly to pay a person when a program would do it for free. . .

Obnoxious?

[BTWR]

I can't tell if it's assinine, obnoxious, smart, or wrong...

Slightly OT, but I know a lot of people who seem to go out of their way, no joke, to make referrers not get $ for ad-referrals.
What do I mean by this? Well, I know people who, when seeing a referral link by a site like techbargains or fatwallet (where they get paid if you BUY, not just click), that they'll just manually type in "amazon.com" into their address bar and find the item themselves. It saves them nothing, and loses the referrer their commission.

I still can't decide whether or not this is obnoxious. My lean is that it is.

What fools these mortals be...

[russotto]

Most of the clicking on the ads on my pages is done by my hordes of zombied machines (too lazy to insert link to related story), when I'm not renting them out to spammers.

Mao Tzedung is outdated...

[AchilleTalon]

isn't the guy who said: "What would happen to the world if all the chinese people step down from a bench at the same time?"

This should now be read:

"What would happen to the NYSE and the NASAQ if all the indian people would click the mouse at the same time?"

Chinese wisdom has been surpassed by Indian wisdom...

Re:Ahh, the good ol' days of getting $$ from click

[Anonymous Coward]

Got u beat. Ran the same scam using Hotline instead of FTP and made about $250-$1,000 a week while I was in college. Fucking ez money.

One Word...

[blunte]

Rakshit! You can say many things about India, but you cannot deny they have some truly entertaining names. Dickshit anyone?

Re:One Word...

[bot]

Actually Dikshit (pronounced Dhik-Shith) is a very respectable Indian (last) name :-)

There's even a Chief Minister (Indian equivalent of a state governor) with that name.

Re:One Word...

[blunte]

Yes, at one of the companied I worked for, we received a resume from a Dickshit (spelled with the "c"), and one of our resident Indians informed us that one of their biggest television stars had that name, and that it was common. We chose not to interview that person because nobody on the team with enough experience could keep a straight face.

I'm aware that some US names are not so ideal in other languages. But I speak English, so I find this amusing :)

Secret?

[avandesande]

Is it still a secret if it gets posted on /. ?

Ad Clicking is a lot cheaper in India!

[Anonymous Coward]

All thats required is a PS/2 mouse and a cobra.

AllAdvantage, et al.

[macshune]

I remember AllAdvantage and all of its ilk! The greatest motto of the late 90s was this:

GET PAID TO SLEEP!

My friends and I would install numerous get-paid-to-surf programs on our computers and leave them on while we slept, along with these programs (one of them called "MyAdvantage") that would move the mouse around every so often and click links so as to give the appearance of activity. And yes, we *did* receive checks, in excess of $20 some months. Not enough to live off of, of course, but it paid for our cable modem at the time (which was uncapped!).

Re:AllAdvantage, et al.

[EntropyMan]

I made about $3000 from AllAdvantage during the year or so they operated. It damn near financed my sophomore year: books, entertainment, pizza, etc. No one believed me at first when I tried to sign them up: they all figured it was a pyramid scheme simply because the organizational structure looked something like a pyramid. (Things that are actually a scam aren't usually free).

The minute I heard about the program, I immediately signed up 30 of my closest friends under my user id (my upstream was happy about that). My friends, being the motivated engineering chaps they were, all signed up *their* friends, etc. At the height of the "boom", I was making over $300 a month in AllAdvantage payments!

In Soviet Dot-Com-Era, the pyramid scheme pays YOU!

Re:AllAdvantage, et al.

[macshune]

That's a great story. Yeah, I knew this other guy that did pretty much the same thing, although I'm not sure he was quite as industrious as you, but he made some serious dough. Man oh man, that was a totally heady time.

I can't think of another paradigm shift that would cause something like that again, but I suppose if I could I'd be rich...

Unethical, I Tell You!!!

[Frosty Piss]

From the story:

"It's a numbers game as far as media buying is concerned. And anybody who can manipulate numbers gets the edge. This is unethical, and needs to be curbed."

And the tactics of the blood-sucking pop-up using ad leaches are never unethical? It's all the same game!

More power to the click-for-cash moms.

Silly rabbit...

[monkeyfamily]

This is maybe the 10th time I've seen you post a mirror, and the 10th time that the page didn't need one. The original servers have invariably served up the article faster than your demonmoo. If you are not in fact a perl script written by a karma whore, you're wasting precious minutes of your life. Get outdoors and get some kicks while the climate's mild and energy's cheap!

Re:Silly rabbit...

[doctorfaustus]

This is maybe the 10th time I've seen you post a mirror, and the 10th time that the page didn't need one.

You're new here, aren't you? :-)

Re:Darn Identity Thieves!

[Anonymous Coward]

did you mean "A girl robot! This is going to be the best pr0n ever!"

Secret army?

[My_Dirty_Facist_Ass]

Well, it's not so secret now!

Way to go, Slashdot.

I suspect there's an even better solution...

[gengee]

Sites like TicketMaster use captchas -- images of slightly distorted words which are hard for computers to interpret, but simple for humans -- to prevent spammers and bots from using (abusing) their services. I think some blog softwares have these simlple Turing tests built in as well.

Spammers and bot masters have come up with an incredibly simple solution, though. Pr0n.

Throw up a website with twenty or thirty thousand high-quality, free pr0n images. The catch? You have to type in the characters or words displayed in a captcha for every 'n' pr0n images.

Instant, distributed, human captcha OCR. If your pr0n site has heavy enough traffic, you can do this distributed captcha OCR fairly quickly -- sometimes in under a minute.

Why not do the same thing here. (Referer:? How to track the click @ the pr0n site? (JavaScript (a la WebTrends SDC?))).

I'm not sure of the details, but I suspect it would work.

Re:I suspect there's an even better solution...

[Dirtside]

The spammers are way ahead of you -- there was a Slashdot article about this some time ago.

So either:

1) You thought of something clever independently. Congrats! You've got a bright future ahead of you as a programmer.

2) You forgot that you'd read an article about this, and thought you came up with it on your own. Poor you. You've got a dim future ahead of you as a tech support monkey.

3) You pretended to come up with this idea on your own even though you know you read it in an article. Programmers of the world, tremble in fear, and witness the birth of a middle manager.

Too bad

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd love to read the ensuing discussions related to your questions as it pertains to today's internet and ads, but I'm afraid I'll find nothing but juvenile racist comments about Indians and outsourcing to India. :-(

No kidding

[Anonymous Coward]

I have a web page, how do I get into these ad banner that anytime someone click on my ad on my page I get pay 10c or 25c.

India outsources everything now

[Duke_Gonzo]

Ad-Clickers Virus/Trojan writers Spammers Telemarketers 419 scammers Spyware/Adware creators Multi-Level Marketing Pyramid Schemes Soon they will have outsourced lawyers to India, so Hadji can fly in from Bombay or appear via a video web camera over the Internet to represent you in US courts.

Re:India outsources everything now

[Anonymous Coward]

If you didnt know, Mohandas Gandhi, aka Mahatma Gandhi, father of the nation for India was a lawyer who started his non-violence movement after flying to south africa to practise law.

Using software to do the task

[ThomasFlip]

This has probably already been mentioned in a previous post, but why wouldn't these people just send off trojans do increase traffic.

Funny they mention something about the dotcom boom

[ShadowRage]

because today on the news, they said there are signs of a second dotcom boom happening again soon.

welcome to the global economy

[Anonymous Coward]

dey didn't take em

the brass here, and you (by proxy, should you own any type of stock) gave em away, in the pursuit of more $$ for those at the top (and the stockholders, of course)

Dang!!

[DrDebug]

Even a Spamee's job is being outsourced!!

Re:I look at those ads -- willingly, & buy stu

[Sunnan]

Ads separated from content, which is the way to do it.

Re:Darn MMORPGs!

[Anonymous Coward]

This is already being done with Lineage 2. Do a google search for Adena Farms Inc. to see people reactions.

To be honest, after reading one forum thread, I couldn't help thinking that if the whiney little shits shut-up, they'd have a hell of a game on their hands, with real people effectively taking over from mobs, and usually carrying a lot of money.

An all-out war against the clan would be great in my opinion.

Click on my ads after watching grass grow

[Hulkster]

This is a total troll (yea, there is Adsense on the clickable link - rest assured the cents/click-thru is tiny), but maybe some of them will want to watch grass growing.

I imagine this page would be about as exciting as anything else they are looking at. alek

he answered this....

[zogger]

... the other day in another similar reply post. He's just a dude got extra server space and bandwith, and there's no way to tell a lot of times if some linked-to place will go down or not, and if you wait until it goes down, you can't get the content to mirror it. Catch 22 there.

I don't see it as a big problem really, I've missed a lot of sites that got slashdotted before they even got presented to the leeching hordes here, of which I am one (non subscribers on time dealy viewing). I appreciate his mirror and anyone else who mirrors really, more power to them, and more power to the sites that stay up and don't crash and burn from a slashdotting as well, just ya never know...

I know...:)

[gengee]

I didn't mean to claim the captcha-defeat-by-pr0n idea as my own. I think I made it pretty clear that the technique is already in use.

I was simply applying the same idea to ad clicks.

Reading through the comments of the story you linked to, though, I see a comment which notes that some pr0n sites are already doing this. They link to pay-by-click sites, then ask the visitor to write-in the fourth word from the third sentence on the site. (Or whatever else).

Where does that leave me in your numbered list? I'm not sure.

Ad-clicking gnomes!

[Liket]

1. Click ads.
2. ???
3. Profit!

lighten up

[Avishalom]

oh , come on...

i did not mean to contribute to any anti-globalizaton-auto-reply-MS-is-evil arguments, so there's no need to get all jumpy

anyway, lets put it this way, SCO, isn't about to lose any money on this. and the companies that do, will probably learn something about pricing ...(and they are likely the 4 out of five , and not the 1 in a 1M)

but to answer your (nitpicking?) questions

1. what do they give society? well, for one they create evolutionary pressure to do away stupid business models

2. no i do not think that poor people are automatically riteous, but i truely am happy that some kids can make 3$ and not by begging or worse.
('mister , please , just 7 cleeks')

Sure, but just remember that...

[Stealth Potato]

In Soviet Russia, ad clicks YOU! ...Sorry, couldn't resist. Actually, I could, but if you say something like "I couldn't resist", it automatically absolves you of all blame for following a hackneyed /. cliche.

Sincerest apologies for the interruption. Please continue with the stunningly fruitful discussion that I'm sure was going on somewhere in these comments.

who?

[Anonymous Coward]

The trend is catching up in India. Says Goutam Rakshit, chairman, Advertising Council of India

Too bad North American advertisers don't have these type of revealing names. They would be much easier to spot and avoid.

And you must be the 8th time someone complains

[Anonymous Coward]

about it. This is an automated bot, check it's comma errors - they are the same everytime. You complain to a bot and you'd never know.

So what's the problem? Put him in your foes list, assign your foes a -10 and never see him again. But NO you'd like to whine about a person here on the forum who tries to be helpful AND make some money.

I find it very useful. If the original site is still up, well no problem. If the original site is down, you'll have a mirror instantly. So where's your problem?

Jealousy? Because you haven't come up with such an idea and now he's getting insightfuls every day? Because he is using slashdot to present his ads? Come on be real, he is donating his bandwith to slashdot and you could bear with the shameless plugs.

BTW he said last time he wanted to check his load balancing. Dunno if this is true but I don't object with an advertising for a product that gives ME (and fellow readers) a tried and true advantage almost everytime. Slashdot has its own ads, remember? But Slashdot couldn't come up with an automated mirror system because of copyright fears and other worries. So fine, he has found its niche and is now filling the gap CowboyNeal et al. left in the Slashdot universe: automated site mirrors.

Turing Test Arms Race / Evolution in Action

[billstewart]

"Think of it as Evolution in action." The first couple of years of the DotCom boom were partly about exploring new technology, and partly about learning the value of different advertising models, since many of the companies were funded based on the unknown value of eyeballs, clickthroughs, banners, transient coolness-factor and brand loyalty creation, or on the ability to provide services to implement those. (The other main model, which had a much bigger impact on the world, was using the low cost of communications to disintermediate traditional distribution channels and reintermediate other channels.) The advertising models that were explored included counting banner impressions, counting clickthroughs, and counting actual sales - all of them have some value, and the lower-value services were easier to count and bill for, but harder to measure the effectiveness of and thus harder to price accurately, and they were also easier to fake if you were a rip-off artist. One reason clickthrough is a common price element is that it's a closer approximation to measuring real customer interest, and banner impressions are fuzzier as well as easier to fake.

Yes, it's usually unscrupulous, but if the ad banner companies get customers to pay them by the clickthrough, and don't provide adequate mechanisms for the customer to know whether they're cheating them, and the customer doesn't insist on contractual provisions and technical terms to know whether their ad service is cheating them, then it's pretty much guaranteed that there will be firms out there whose real business plan is based on suckers being born every minute. (And yes, I realize I just said that customers have to depend on their advertising services to provide many of the tools to detect whether or not they should trust them, and that that's pretty dodgy.)

Another occasional user of such services is evil third parties - companies that run their competition out of business by swamping their ads with clickthroughs and running up huge charges, though that's much more likely to use scripts and bots than to pay humans to do the work, since the benefits are only indirect, plus they want to hit their victims hard and fast, while greedy admongers want to inflate the hit rates slowly enough that they're believable. Similarly, evil third-party ad banner companies may want to drive their ad-banner competitors out of business, and creating large bogus bills that drive away customers is an obvious way to do that, since it trashes the ad company's reputation whether the end customer pays them or not. This was a more popular attack on banner-impression sales than clickthroughs, again because it was much easier to fake.

The methods used for clicking banners and the methods used for detecting fraud evolve together. If easy scripts can do the job, somebody will pound on them fast and hard and they'll die, and this used to happen a lot. So there's some complexity that needs to be built in, but a lot of it is economics - the cost of paying Americans and West Europeans and Japanese to click on banner ads is high enough that it's not a very cost-effective way to rip off your customers, compared to the amount of work it would take to simply do a better job of advertising. But if you can outsource it to parts of the world where the wage scale is much lower, and you can still avoid getting caught, maybe you can get away with it for a while - Darwin takes out overly virulent parasites, but parasites that aren't greedy enough to kill off their hosts can sometimes do pretty well.

How do you detect this sort of thing if you're a customer? Well, you need marketing people who can do a good evaluation of the effectiveness of their marketing campaigns (you need them anyway, sinc e you need to make sure your ad banners or annoying popups or search engine keywords or snail-mail CD-ROMs are attracting enough customers to pay for themselves), and you need engineers to help your marketing people measure and correlate the sources of clickthroughs and any sales that might result and optionally try to detect cheating, and you need some business managers (possibly the marketing folks) to check on the reputations of the advertising companies, and you need some lawyers to help you with the contracts.

Given enough monkeys...

[mousse-man]

enough typewriters, they can come up with the works of Shakespeare.

Or maybe given enough Indians, they can come up with the .com boom? :)

StoreCodes.com?

[Anonymous Coward]

Who is currentcodes? I much prefer storecodes.com. :)

Train rabbits...

[AchilleTalon]

to click for peanuts. I've just seen a TV program about rabbits in Australia. And it seems a guy freed 24 rabbits in his farm and ends up with 22 millions two years later.

I think about starting my "lettuce for mouse clicks" program.

That's odd...

[bLindmOnkey]

I must wonder why that article mentions such a small site as an example for a "clicker" site. Just take a look at this: http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details? &range=3m&size=medium&compare_sites=www.quickercli ckers.com&url=click2freemoney.com#top That is the traffic ranking for Click2freemoney.com as opposed to a larger site called QuickerClickers.com .

Re:I look at those ads -- willingly, & buy stu

[NoYes19]

Tell that to the paper boy who carries an extra 100 pounds of ads when he is delevering papers on sunday!

Re:It's called

[Anonymouse Cownerd]

CPA, or cost per action

Re:I look at those ads -- willingly, & buy stu

[Felinoid]

I'm as anti-advertising as the next guy
I'm worse... I'm very anti ads.

But I agree those ads are very nice.
I read em and when I'm done I toss em.
As a kid I'd snag the radio shack insert and tell my mother what I wanted for my birthday.
As an adult I look and see who's selling Coke for 99 cents per 2 liter.
(as I type this I have a 99 cent Shasta 3 liter in front of me)
My grandmother reads them as well and I'm always stuck behind the idiot who has a 6 month old insert with an ad for a ONE DAY sale clamming it's just arrived today... and today being a saturday.

People read em. Smart people like you and me.. and dumb people like time warp man.

Welcome to the wonderful dot net bust era :-)

[Anonymous Coward]

No we are moving to the new dot net bust era :-)
Hurrah!!

Oh, but they do!

[Fantastic Lad]

Too bad North American advertisers don't have these type of revealing names. They would be much easier to spot and avoid

George Bush = Pussy

Colin Powell = Colon (Sceptic tank for the Ass)

Dick Cheney = Dick

Look around you in your regular life. I believe that the Universe is just one big thought pattern, which means that psychological metaphor rules.

-FL

This just in: Americas Secret Army of ...

[torpor]

... Wanking Burger Stuffers are actively consuming large portions of carcinogen-laced fat while filling the ecosystem with human waste!

Cheap labor

[hsa]

How long until they start using these people for harvesting email addresses? I mean any human can translate myname.REMOVE@THIS.mydomain.com to a real address.

And these addresses would be verified and cheap.

Sophisticated my *ss

[bitusmeus]

COmpanies that pay-per-click use sophisticated analysis

I once worked in this industry. The anything remotely like "sophisticated analysis" is not much more than people paid to make up reasons to strip out click-sources when the customer complains that their click rates are too high. At the company I worked for, we all *believed* we had automagic software that detected non-human response patterns, and our marketing touted that capability. Even the *engineers who wrote the analysis engine* believed it was in there (until some of us proved it was not possible). It turns out that way back in the dawn of time, someone in marketing misinterpreted a position piece that said we *should develop* the capability. It was even in the spec. Just not in the product. After years of saying "we detect blah blah blah", our marketing VP decided that a human review of he results was sufficient to support the claim.

OT: adsense

[lorcha]

How much does adsense pay per click, anyhow? They don't say on their website, but I was always curious.

Re:OT: adsense

[dindi]

hi !
This is shady .. you cannot find exact information on what % they pay after each click, however with a friend we estimated it to be between 35-70%
I can see $3-3.5 clicks on my financial sites (what I get after the click), while I can see an average click price of $1.5 on my medication related sites (meds will be cancelled by google in mid may by the way).

I do not have (high)tech related sites at this time, so I have no idea how much a click is.

so we have no idea honestly ... I can see a steady $20-25/ day on 5-6 sites (alltogether)...
traffic for these sites are around 3-3500 uniq visitors a week (also alltogether)

that brings back some of what I spend on ads, so I am happy with it ...

I hope it gives you an estimate...
If you need more info drop me a mail slashdot@healthhangout.com or use ./ PM

have a nice day .dindi