4 ms·

Honestly, it'd be pretty interesting to see an article like this which continues after the 'approved for ad networks' part and shows how such a site could rank

by CM30 6y ago

Honestly, it'd be pretty interesting to see an article like this which continues after the 'approved for ad networks' part and shows how such a site could rank in Google, do well on social media sites, etc. Could be interesting to see how scammers are doing that, and lead to some potentially interesting insights about black hat SEO, social media marketing, targeted ads, etc. Because yeah, as you said, getting approved by an ad network is only part of the story, and not very much of it at that.

berbec 6y ago
It may be a low bar, but being able to automate this (scraping website ansible playbook?), makes the effort required as near-nil. They only have to clear $50 to pay for ALOT of domains and hosting.
- notahacker 6y ago
  Sure but you need thousands of legitimate-seeming pageviews to get that $50 back, and the networks - even or especially the bottom tier ones - are likely to be hotter on click fraud than scraped content.
  - terrycody 6y ago
    +1 its really not easy to get the ad revenue, scraped websites can't rank good and get enough visitors, of course one can make fraud clicks system, but if one can do this level, he may easily find more interesting things, but not peanut $$
  - mgamache 6y ago
    You would have to get ~16,000 pageviews to make $50. (assuming $3.00 CPM -- which would be low for adsense, but not for these second tier networks).
    - luckylion 6y ago
      And 16,000 page views without unique content and links might happen, but most likely not within a year or five. If you're lucky, you trigger something in Google's black box and they rank your site better than others at the same level, but you'll still only do long tail, and even on long tail, you'll compete with the original source of the article, which has a billion links pointing to its domain. Since you'll also need to go for quantity, you'll have a giant amount of pages as well, which will not help you even with niche rankings. I doubt that the site would pull in 10 actual, human visitors per day on average with just scraped content.

by CM30 6y ago

berbec 6y ago

It may be a low bar, but being able to automate this (scraping website ansible playbook?), makes the effort required as near-nil. They only have to clear $50 to pay for ALOT of domains and hosting.

notahacker 6y ago
Sure but you need thousands of legitimate-seeming pageviews to get that $50 back, and the networks - even or especially the bottom tier ones - are likely to be hotter on click fraud than scraped content.
- terrycody 6y ago
  +1 its really not easy to get the ad revenue, scraped websites can't rank good and get enough visitors, of course one can make fraud clicks system, but if one can do this level, he may easily find more interesting things, but not peanut $$
- mgamache 6y ago
  You would have to get ~16,000 pageviews to make $50. (assuming $3.00 CPM -- which would be low for adsense, but not for these second tier networks).
  - luckylion 6y ago
    And 16,000 page views without unique content and links might happen, but most likely not within a year or five. If you're lucky, you trigger something in Google's black box and they rank your site better than others at the same level, but you'll still only do long tail, and even on long tail, you'll compete with the original source of the article, which has a billion links pointing to its domain. Since you'll also need to go for quantity, you'll have a giant amount of pages as well, which will not help you even with niche rankings. I doubt that the site would pull in 10 actual, human visitors per day on average with just scraped content.