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Actually, what you have proposed is exactly the approach that some black-hat practitioners have used to hide click-fraud. Some guys will setup a script to go t
by zupreme 15y ago
Actually, what you have proposed is exactly the approach that some black-hat practitioners have used to hide click-fraud.
Some guys will setup a script to go to 5 sites (for example) and click ads on all of them. Their site will be one of the 5. All of the site owners make money, as do they, and because it's distributed across multiple sites, Google does not flag the activity as blatant click-fraud.
If you spend any time a BHW you will see these schemes over and over again, along with people claiming to make hundreds of dollars per day "on autopilot"....
- ktizo 15y agoThat is similar, but I was meaning it less in terms of hiding click-fraud and more in terms of click-fraud-fraud, which would have a far more devastating effect on googles customers and if it was widespread enough would be horrendously bad for google as well.
- redthrowaway 15y agoI'm not advocating anything illegal, but this might be just what it would take for Google to fix their policies. Scrape a few million sites with Adsense, rent a Russian botnet, and spam-click ads until Google takes notice.
- shabble 15y agosemi-OT, but I've occasionally wondered if these botnets for hire actually come with any sort of term of use/AOP. Certain behaviours are more likely to get the individual zombies identified and potentially notified and cleaned up, so you'd think the botnet herders would try to minimise (or charge a much higher rate for) those sorts of activities. I'm also curious how actually deploying to a rented/borrowed botnet is done - what's stopping the client from using a payload which nukes and replaces the controller with one of their own, stealing it from the owner?
- tlrobinson 15y agoI don't know for sure, but perhaps the botnet provides higher level abstractions (DDoS, spam mailer, click bots, etc), or a sandboxed environment. "Heroku for botnets".
- VMG 15y agoBut what should they do? I don't really see an easy solution to this problem.
- redthrowaway 15y agoNot a clue, but Google's got enough of a braintrust to figure it out. They deal with SERP spammers fairly well; they can deal with clickfraud as well without punishing innocent people and not giving them a chance to fix it.
- ktizo 15y agoIn about 6 months, that is going to be Yahoo's new business plan, once they realise that suing facebook doesn't count as an industry in and of itself.