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Inside the Real Economy Behind Fake Twitter Followers
colinneagle writes "People continue to pay money for Twitter followers, and, naturally, a deep network of developers and merchants has arisen to feed the market. A Barracuda Labs study found that the average dealer has the capacity to control as many as 150,000 followers at a time, sometimes more. Those who can control 20,000 fake accounts and can attract sales of $20 or more — the going rate is 1,000 followers for a minimum of $18 — stand to earn roughly $800 per day, according to Barracuda Labs. Keep in mind that very little of this work is manual; the dealers could easily control a system of botnets and set up a few software tools to automate much of the process. Using Twitter's API, developers can design programs that collect all the information of a given group of Twitter users, such as, for example, the 800,000 users following Mitt Romney's account. These programs don't necessarily hijack these accounts — they copy the images and text from their profiles and tweets. This pool of information can then be automatically ported into accounts based on an algorithm that automates the registration process on a massive scale."
As a side project I built TwitterAudit (which is under a lot of load right now and runs on a 512mb VPS :) to estimate how many followers are real vs how many are fake. It looks at a sample of 5000 followers and about 5 criteria to guess whether a given user is real or fake... check it out!
That's like organizing a speech in a stadium to only fill the seats with stuffed mannequins... then proceeding to do the speech anyway.
And then taking a picture from high above in a blimp and putting it in the paper with the headline about the speech given to a full stadium. The public doesn't know that the audience is fake, but it sure looks good for the speaker.
WTB [sig], PST!!!
Assuming so, what is the tangible benefit of doing that? Does Mitt Romney win the election if he has more (albiet fake) Twitter followers?
Many voters, probably most, are too apathetic to bother evaluating candidates on their merits. Instead they extrapolate those merits from things like poll numbers and other horse race indicators. "Well, if that many people follow Romney on Twitter, he must be legit." "Well if more people favor Romeny over Obama in this or that completely unscientific and opaquely evaluated popularity contest, he must be the better candidate!"
Its true that only an idiot would use a candidate's number of Twitter followers to make their choice in a political election. Which is exactly why this is a potential problem.
...unless you're in on this sort of thing early, you usually can't really profit much from it. You can profit, and waste time, but it's better to find the next frontier rather than jumping on the bandwagon.
I know some guys who do this sort of thing and they always end up using a combination of outsourced labor and automated posters, and it's really not that hard to do. XRumer usually does a decent job at this sort of thing, amongst others. The thing is, they were in on it early, before twitter even became a thing in the mainstream.
Really, though, aside from just selling followers to people and generating a bit of ad revenue or whatever, this is probably less profitable than splogging and having cloaking pages take non-spider visitors to your sales pages... From there you just spam links...though Penguin made that a bit more difficult. Either way, this type of marketing suffers diminishing returns faster than anything I've ever worked with, otherwise, I'd be spamming twitter right now.