Slashdot Mirror
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.
"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!!
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.
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.
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.