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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?"
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...
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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!
"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.
"Right now, somewhere in this world, Scott Baio is plowing a woman he doesn't love," - Peter Griffin, *Family Guy*
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
-- Avishalom is usually vish
the article mentions that you have to stay on the page for ~60 seconds.
there's no place like ~
The article mentions that you have to stay on the page for ~60 seconds. Tabbed browsing.
...those Ad people think their ads really are reaching people.
Someone put a black hole in my pocket and now I'm broke.
Or a virus. "Borrow" millions of PC's to click through ads and sell spam relays on the side.
A fine is a tax you pay for doing wrong and a tax is a fine you pay for doing all right.
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.
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.
Sir, there is a dragon outside with an armful of armor. He's inquiring if we offer free refills.
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.
Milo
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.
/Still wishing I hadn't used my real e-mail address to sign up for FreeRide...
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.
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
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?
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.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks