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?"
I had to hire my Ad-Clicking replacement today!
Happy Trails!
Erick
http://www.busyweather.com/
Now where in America did those jobs come from?
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.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
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...
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
Trolling is a art,
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.
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.
Yeah, I'm a Republican AND a geek. It is possible.
When even punching the monkey gets outsourced.
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.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
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.
The Army reading list
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.
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.
The 90's called, they want their clicks back.
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..
My sig left me for a younger user id.
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?
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."
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.
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!
Kaa
Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.
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'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.
DEY TOOK AHR JAHBS!!
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 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!!!
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
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!
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".
...those Ad people think their ads really are reaching people.
Someone put a black hole in my pocket and now I'm broke.
This is going to be the best prom ever!"
John
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...
My sig could be your sig!
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.
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.
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!
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.
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 : /
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