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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?"
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.
I was taking one day at a time, but then several days got together and ambushed me. (from a Rhymes with Orange comic)
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.
Coupon Clipper-type people foam at the mouth over those sunday ads.
Really.
no
"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?
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?
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.
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.
Ok, then, use a distributed client... rent peoples CPU time, and run the script on millions of PC's.
Lex orandi, lex credendi.
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.
We have secretly replaced these Slashdot mods' sense of humor with a rusty nail. Let's see if they notice!!
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.
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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 :-)
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.
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
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!
Don't think that a small group of dedicated individuals can't change the world. It's the only thing that ever has.
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.
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...
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.
Still, with a plan, you only get the best you can imagine. I'd always hoped for something better than that. -CP
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.
- James
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.
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!
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
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)'"
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.
there's no place like ~
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.