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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?"
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.
I use PPC (pay-per-click) advertising to some of my sites/projects, and yes, I hade to waste some hundred $$ before I knwe where to advertise ...
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.. bringing completely useless traffic in exchange for your $$.
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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
(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
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".
.. that's just 4,000 clicks, or 150 per day. Right.
Who is paying 25 cents per click? With programmers at WiPro earning, say, $1000 US per month
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".
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)
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
A pc was loading a web bug through 1200 caching servers, apparenty using them to generate ad hits.
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.
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.
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!!!
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.
I.O.U One Sig.