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

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

[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

[TykeClone]

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

Outsourced?

[Gadzuko]

Now where in America did those jobs come from?

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.

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?

[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?

[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.

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...

[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...

[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...

[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)'"

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.

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

[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

[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.

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

[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

[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.

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

[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

[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

[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.

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...

[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.

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

[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.

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.

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.

Shell script

[Anonymous Coward]

Seems relevant

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?

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

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!

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...

[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.

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.

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....

[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: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..

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.

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 ...

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 ...

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:Darn Identity Thieves!

[plover]

"A girl robot!

This is going to be the best prom ever!"

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 :-)

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.

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...

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 : /

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...

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.

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.