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How I Made Money Spamming Twitter with Contextual Book Suggestions

109 points by hoop 16y ago

DotSauce 16y ago
Here's a legitimate way to make money from affiliate programs on Twitter. I make modest commissions each month via @ThemeHunter without promoting. http://www.dotsauce.com/2009/10/28/affiliate-id-rss-feed-yahoo-pipes/ http://www.dotsauce.com/2009/10/28/affiliate-id-rss-feed-yah...
ritonlajoie 16y ago
Even if it is spam , this kind of idea always amaze me.And everytime, I am jealous to not having thinking about it before.. How many of these bots are spamming twitter already ?
- hoop 16y ago
  While I haven't seen any numbers, I think that there are alot of these bots. I have even less of an idea if any of them are contextual alot. Right before I was suspended, I believe that there was a report that came out that suggested that a large percentage of Twitter's traffic was caused by spam bots like these. I'll see if I can find the report and verify the numbers! What I do know is that there are certain keywords that put you in line to be tweeted at for some product or website. Some keywords have more bots trolling the search API than others. UPDATE: I wasn't able to find the report I was looking for, but I did find the following blog post. It contains a graph that shows that SPAM used to account for about 10% of Twitter's traffic. This number is now below 1%. http://blog.twitter.com/2010/03/state-of-twitter-spam.html http://blog.twitter.com/2010/03/state-of-twitter-spam.html
fno 16y ago
That is a great idea and I do not find it too spammy. Twitter could implement something like that themselves as advertisement (simple context aware text ads).
- hoop 16y ago
  It appears that Twitter is starting to move in this direction. I recently read that they now embed what they call "Promoted Tweets" (another word for an ad) in their search results. I'm wondering how long it will be before these start showing up in our timelines.
nowarninglabel 16y ago
My keywords: "with, from, have, that" I think the algorithm could use some work. Also, the book suggestions are greyed out/faded. Makes me think there aren't any suggestions, you should make the icons come through in full color.
- hoop 16y ago
  Sadly, I lost my corpus some time ago so until I pull more data from Twitter (I've got a script doing this as we speak) the suggestions are going to be a little weak. The book suggestions are faded unless you mouse over them - if you click on them, you will be able to see a description of the book (as provided by Amazon.) I'll experiment with different design elements to see how I could make this more intuitive. Any suggestions?
  - nowarninglabel 16y ago
    Great to see a response. Regardless of your previous bot, seems like you have a good application now and it is worth getting off the ground. I will try it again in a couple weeks once your Corpus is rebuilt. As far as the design, I would suggest the book icons come through in full color, and when you mouse over you could highlight them, or even better provide a short summary (just like how Netflix provides mouse over summaries of movie suggestions).
    - hoop 16y ago
      Thanks for the feedback! I've taken your advice and changed the look/highlight effect of the book icons. Check it out again and see what you think http://www.charleshooper.net/twitter/ http://www.charleshooper.net/twitter/
      - nowarninglabel 16y ago
        Looks much better now =) Only other suggestion I would give is to improve the UI on that landing page. I'll be interested to see how this turns out for you. Cheers.
xulescu 16y ago
Interesting idea (to suggest based on already written content). Maybe it would be considered less "spammy" if it would be just semi-automated, i.e. more like an "expert system". Also, it it would work for popular forums like PHP BB or others, would greatly extend it's usage (so not just on Twitter).
- hoop 16y ago
  Hi there, That's a great idea. I hadn't thought about plugging it into a bulletin board system, but did think about trying to plug it into facebook. A recommendation engine plugin for phpbb, etc could definitely make the forum operator some additional revenue.
mike-cardwell 16y ago
I'm surprised more people aren't speaking against what you did... I guess people aren't too bothered about spam until it gets above a certain threshold, and I guess it's only Twitters money that people like you are wasting by abusing their services and breaking their T&C's
- hoop 16y ago
  Hi Mike, HN is the best response I've received compared to any of the other sites that this link was submitted to, to include Reddit and Digg. Two thoughts come to mind: 1. HN is where we just saw a thread where users posted about the most unethical things they've done to get a startup off the ground. 2. I think that many HNers could relate to me. I was a broke, down-and-out geek/hacker-type that came up with an idea and took it on for the technical challenge. And, hey, I made a few dollars off of it, too.
  - mike-cardwell 16y ago
    Cool. So it's ok for me to abuse any services you launch in future, costing you money for my own personal financial gain? Sweet.
    - akkartik 16y ago
      How is a twitter bot costing Twitter money?
      - mike-cardwell 16y ago
        I wouldn't like to guess how many man hours it has taken them to develop the software and processes required to deal with spam on twitter? Then there are the ongoing costs of dealing with new spamming methods, and the increased hardware costs of having to deal with the extra load caused by the spam. And then there is the less obvious negative impact it has on their brand and image when their users are sent unsolicited spam.
        16y ago
joe-mccann 16y ago
I did this a long time ago, almost the exact same thing, but I actually parsed trending topics and searched Amazon for ANY product, not just books, based on the content of the trending topic. I started out with books, but moved on to all products. It was a cool project and netted me some cash but not worth carrying on so I dumped it about a year ago. Was actually incredibly easy to do. I'm sure there are loads more out there.
- hoop 16y ago
  Very cool. I hadn't thought of seeding the recommendations with trending topics. What kind of conversion rate did you get?
rb2k_ 16y ago
Trying the website resulted in this: We recommended these books based on the following terms: schon, only, when, that It's really weird that any of the suggestions made sense when words like these aren't blocked. The "schon" is German, but the rest should really not play into any ratings
- hoop 16y ago
  Hi, thanks for the feedback! Apparently my corpus isn't a large enough size to naturally filter out useless words like the ones you listed so I have added stopword filtering. Give it another shot and see how it works for you.
nerfhammer 16y ago
What did an actual recommendation tweet look like?
- hoop 16y ago
  Hi nerfhammer, They started out like "@{{user}} You should read {{book title}} {{shortened book url}}" but many people would take offense if the recommendation wasn't a very good one or the book touched on a sensitive subject (like weight.) I had much better results with "@{{user}} Have you read {{book title}}? {{shorted book url}}"
mildweed 16y ago
$400. Just go ahead and release the code. It didn't make you that much money.
- hoop 16y ago
  Hah, nice try :-)
aspam 16y ago
Posted from a throwaway account. I make about 400 EUR every month from Amazon referals without actively doing anything. I own a comunity fueld site (hosting pictures) that receives about 70k visits (20k unique) per month. Its just a little hobby project that runs itself and has been unchanged for 2 or 3 years now. It's hard to find advertisers due to the sometimes offensive content, let alone making money from banner ads. So I did the next logical thing: putting an invisible iframe on the site that loads Amazon with my referal id. Anyone who visits my site and decides to go shoppind on Amazon in the next few days, still has this referal id stored in a cookie. Note that I don't actually link to Amazon anywhere. Conversion is soley based on chance. My conversion rate is about 0.5% and I've been doing this for about 18 month now.
- japherwocky 16y ago
  hoop saw similar things with his affiliate links; a lot of the sales didn't come from the books he recommended, but once people were on amazon they'd end up buying something.
  - hoop 16y ago
    Yep. Peddled everything from "sensual massage devices" (which I had no idea Amazon carried) to e-books.
  - imp 16y ago
    That's much different though. Those people were at least manually clicking on the amazon links and not having their cookie stuffed secretly in the background. I have a low-traffic book review website that makes $2/month from Amazon affiliates, and around Christmas someone bought a Kindle and I got credit for that, which was a nice surprise. All I ever linked to were books, but if someone starts browsing around Aamzon then you'll get credit for whatever they end up buying.
  - utnick 16y ago
    yea I run a couple book sites and one time a person clicked on one of my book links and ended up buying a couple thousand dollars worth of camera equipment. Jackpot!
ohashi 16y ago
All I can say is, nice work. It's creative. I've made some decent money off affiliate programs and twitter. What you're doing is similar in nature to what a lot of people are doing (human and bot).
- hoop 16y ago
  Thanks for your feedback!
Sukotto 16y ago
This is an excellent example of the kind of advertising I actually don't mind getting. 1) Directly related to something I just said I wanted 2) You never advertise to me more than once. I wish more advertisers (or even spammers) worked this way.
Vivtek 16y ago
Upvoted for finally naming that algorithm I've been off-and-on trying to research for the last year or so. Thank you!
- hoop 16y ago
  Hah, thank japherwocky for that one!

109 points by hoop 16y ago

Here's a legitimate way to make money from affiliate programs on Twitter. I make modest commissions each month via @ThemeHunter without promoting. http://www.dotsauce.com/2009/10/28/affiliate-id-rss-feed-yahoo-pipes/ http://www.dotsauce.com/2009/10/28/affiliate-id-rss-feed-yah...

ritonlajoie 16y ago

Even if it is spam , this kind of idea always amaze me.And everytime, I am jealous to not having thinking about it before.. How many of these bots are spamming twitter already ?

hoop 16y ago
While I haven't seen any numbers, I think that there are alot of these bots. I have even less of an idea if any of them are contextual alot. Right before I was suspended, I believe that there was a report that came out that suggested that a large percentage of Twitter's traffic was caused by spam bots like these. I'll see if I can find the report and verify the numbers! What I do know is that there are certain keywords that put you in line to be tweeted at for some product or website. Some keywords have more bots trolling the search API than others. UPDATE: I wasn't able to find the report I was looking for, but I did find the following blog post. It contains a graph that shows that SPAM used to account for about 10% of Twitter's traffic. This number is now below 1%. http://blog.twitter.com/2010/03/state-of-twitter-spam.html http://blog.twitter.com/2010/03/state-of-twitter-spam.html

fno 16y ago

That is a great idea and I do not find it too spammy. Twitter could implement something like that themselves as advertisement (simple context aware text ads).

hoop 16y ago
It appears that Twitter is starting to move in this direction. I recently read that they now embed what they call "Promoted Tweets" (another word for an ad) in their search results. I'm wondering how long it will be before these start showing up in our timelines.

nowarninglabel 16y ago

My keywords: "with, from, have, that" I think the algorithm could use some work. Also, the book suggestions are greyed out/faded. Makes me think there aren't any suggestions, you should make the icons come through in full color.

hoop 16y ago
Sadly, I lost my corpus some time ago so until I pull more data from Twitter (I've got a script doing this as we speak) the suggestions are going to be a little weak. The book suggestions are faded unless you mouse over them - if you click on them, you will be able to see a description of the book (as provided by Amazon.) I'll experiment with different design elements to see how I could make this more intuitive. Any suggestions?
- nowarninglabel 16y ago
  Great to see a response. Regardless of your previous bot, seems like you have a good application now and it is worth getting off the ground. I will try it again in a couple weeks once your Corpus is rebuilt. As far as the design, I would suggest the book icons come through in full color, and when you mouse over you could highlight them, or even better provide a short summary (just like how Netflix provides mouse over summaries of movie suggestions).
  - hoop 16y ago
    Thanks for the feedback! I've taken your advice and changed the look/highlight effect of the book icons. Check it out again and see what you think http://www.charleshooper.net/twitter/ http://www.charleshooper.net/twitter/
    - nowarninglabel 16y ago
      Looks much better now =) Only other suggestion I would give is to improve the UI on that landing page. I'll be interested to see how this turns out for you. Cheers.

xulescu 16y ago

Interesting idea (to suggest based on already written content). Maybe it would be considered less "spammy" if it would be just semi-automated, i.e. more like an "expert system". Also, it it would work for popular forums like PHP BB or others, would greatly extend it's usage (so not just on Twitter).

hoop 16y ago
Hi there, That's a great idea. I hadn't thought about plugging it into a bulletin board system, but did think about trying to plug it into facebook. A recommendation engine plugin for phpbb, etc could definitely make the forum operator some additional revenue.

mike-cardwell 16y ago

I'm surprised more people aren't speaking against what you did... I guess people aren't too bothered about spam until it gets above a certain threshold, and I guess it's only Twitters money that people like you are wasting by abusing their services and breaking their T&C's

hoop 16y ago
Hi Mike, HN is the best response I've received compared to any of the other sites that this link was submitted to, to include Reddit and Digg. Two thoughts come to mind: 1. HN is where we just saw a thread where users posted about the most unethical things they've done to get a startup off the ground. 2. I think that many HNers could relate to me. I was a broke, down-and-out geek/hacker-type that came up with an idea and took it on for the technical challenge. And, hey, I made a few dollars off of it, too.
- mike-cardwell 16y ago
  Cool. So it's ok for me to abuse any services you launch in future, costing you money for my own personal financial gain? Sweet.
  - akkartik 16y ago
    How is a twitter bot costing Twitter money?
    - mike-cardwell 16y ago
      I wouldn't like to guess how many man hours it has taken them to develop the software and processes required to deal with spam on twitter? Then there are the ongoing costs of dealing with new spamming methods, and the increased hardware costs of having to deal with the extra load caused by the spam. And then there is the less obvious negative impact it has on their brand and image when their users are sent unsolicited spam.
      - 16y ago

joe-mccann 16y ago

I did this a long time ago, almost the exact same thing, but I actually parsed trending topics and searched Amazon for ANY product, not just books, based on the content of the trending topic. I started out with books, but moved on to all products. It was a cool project and netted me some cash but not worth carrying on so I dumped it about a year ago. Was actually incredibly easy to do. I'm sure there are loads more out there.

hoop 16y ago
Very cool. I hadn't thought of seeding the recommendations with trending topics. What kind of conversion rate did you get?

rb2k_ 16y ago

Trying the website resulted in this: We recommended these books based on the following terms: schon, only, when, that It's really weird that any of the suggestions made sense when words like these aren't blocked. The "schon" is German, but the rest should really not play into any ratings

hoop 16y ago
Hi, thanks for the feedback! Apparently my corpus isn't a large enough size to naturally filter out useless words like the ones you listed so I have added stopword filtering. Give it another shot and see how it works for you.

nerfhammer 16y ago

What did an actual recommendation tweet look like?

hoop 16y ago
Hi nerfhammer, They started out like "@{{user}} You should read {{book title}} {{shortened book url}}" but many people would take offense if the recommendation wasn't a very good one or the book touched on a sensitive subject (like weight.) I had much better results with "@{{user}} Have you read {{book title}}? {{shorted book url}}"

mildweed 16y ago

$400. Just go ahead and release the code. It didn't make you that much money.

hoop 16y ago
Hah, nice try :-)

aspam 16y ago

Posted from a throwaway account. I make about 400 EUR every month from Amazon referals without actively doing anything. I own a comunity fueld site (hosting pictures) that receives about 70k visits (20k unique) per month. Its just a little hobby project that runs itself and has been unchanged for 2 or 3 years now. It's hard to find advertisers due to the sometimes offensive content, let alone making money from banner ads. So I did the next logical thing: putting an invisible iframe on the site that loads Amazon with my referal id. Anyone who visits my site and decides to go shoppind on Amazon in the next few days, still has this referal id stored in a cookie. Note that I don't actually link to Amazon anywhere. Conversion is soley based on chance. My conversion rate is about 0.5% and I've been doing this for about 18 month now.

japherwocky 16y ago
hoop saw similar things with his affiliate links; a lot of the sales didn't come from the books he recommended, but once people were on amazon they'd end up buying something.
- hoop 16y ago
  Yep. Peddled everything from "sensual massage devices" (which I had no idea Amazon carried) to e-books.
- imp 16y ago
  That's much different though. Those people were at least manually clicking on the amazon links and not having their cookie stuffed secretly in the background. I have a low-traffic book review website that makes $2/month from Amazon affiliates, and around Christmas someone bought a Kindle and I got credit for that, which was a nice surprise. All I ever linked to were books, but if someone starts browsing around Aamzon then you'll get credit for whatever they end up buying.
- utnick 16y ago
  yea I run a couple book sites and one time a person clicked on one of my book links and ended up buying a couple thousand dollars worth of camera equipment. Jackpot!

ohashi 16y ago

All I can say is, nice work. It's creative. I've made some decent money off affiliate programs and twitter. What you're doing is similar in nature to what a lot of people are doing (human and bot).

hoop 16y ago
Thanks for your feedback!

Sukotto 16y ago

This is an excellent example of the kind of advertising I actually don't mind getting. 1) Directly related to something I just said I wanted 2) You never advertise to me more than once. I wish more advertisers (or even spammers) worked this way.

Vivtek 16y ago

Upvoted for finally naming that algorithm I've been off-and-on trying to research for the last year or so. Thank you!

hoop 16y ago
Hah, thank japherwocky for that one!