3 ms·

They spam them to death in the "popular period" and then bank money from the affiliate program If you had to speculate: How much money? (I know, it all depen

They spam them to death in the "popular period" and then bank money from the affiliate program If you had to speculate: How much money? (I know, it all depends, etc. But I was just hoping to get a rough idea of the order of magnitude here.)

aristus 14y ago
I make a hundred bucks a month from amazon affiliate clicks, and I'm lazy.
xSwag 14y ago
Full disclosure: I frequent private "blackhat" forums and although I do not participate in these activities, I blog about them anonymously. Furthermore, I know a few people (online) who do stuff similar to this with CPA content lockers, so I'll try and give you an educated guess. In general the average conversion rate in the TV show/live content is around 0.5-3% depending on the quality of traffic. Now, as you can see from Google Trends[1] some of these get very popular and trend once pretty much every year. In the second comparison, I've compared the search terms with a term I know is definitely popular to get relative popularity of the terms [2]. Comparing these two terms I can get an idea of the amount of traffic these website would get in the time period. I would estimate that the "big spammers" would easily get around 250k-500k uniques from multiple sources (spamming, mass advertising, social media, botnets etc). Assuming they get paid $2 every signup, and have a conversion rate of 1.5% with 300k uniques, it would bank them around $9k, of course I'm only talking about the big guys here who have done this for a long time. In general, I would say that the following is correct: Upper quartile average: $1-3k per day for a few days Lower quartile average: $50-60 per day for a few days Quick edit: It should also be noted that for these live games over 95% of the traffic will be from the USA hence the large profits. --------- [1]http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=Iowa%20vs%20Michigan%2C%20Seminoles%20vs%20Terrapins%2C%20Rutgers%20vs%20Cincinnati%2C%20Florida%20St%20vs%20Maryland&cmpt=q http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=Iowa%20vs%20Michigan%... [2]http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=Iowa%20vs%20Michigan%2C%20Seminoles%20vs%20Terrapins%2C%20Rutgers%20vs%20Cincinnati%2C%20Florida%20St%20vs%20Maryland%2C%20anonymous%20hack&cmpt=q http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=Iowa%20vs%20Michigan%...
ozi 14y ago
Since when was putting the selfish desires of a for-profit company ahead of your own well-being virtuous? This behavior is inherent to human nature, and presumably to everyone here who calls themselves a hacker. That Google doesn't "like" what I do has no moral or legal weight. The same goes for sites that accept user-generated content. Obviously not everybody who's a spammer is good at it or a true hacker, but I would venture a guess that most hackers are blackhat if they do SEO, simply because they see this as a system that can be exploited with controlled heuristic testing as apposed to some superfluous tools and a whack community a la seoMoz.org And it's not a zero-sum game. Google is forced to improve their natural language processing capabilities, their ability to execute more computationally expensive processing on massive amounts of content, so on and so forth, to try and keep up and provide a legitimate product. So back to the spamming; Any site that allows you to put a link on it is a target for seo, of course. Maximizing c-class IP diversity among links is important. But more importantly, these pages are usually Tier-1 to Tier-2 in link schemes as it's effective to point the low level forum spam at user-content generated sites with strong domain authority and funnel the juice to your primary site. They're basically just buffers. How long does it last? Varies greatly on how you're promoting it, the niche its in, etc. It doesn't always have to be "pump and dump" - I have multiple blogs over a year old that are alive and producing $1,200-$2,000 month each with almost no effort. When you can create just one of those blogs with about 10 hours worth of work (in total), there's obviously money to be made. And if you can write all of your own software to automate it, you can pretty much just "print money."
RealGeek 14y ago
Some of my friends make over $200,000 per month with spamming.

aristus 14y ago

I make a hundred bucks a month from amazon affiliate clicks, and I'm lazy.

xSwag 14y ago

Full disclosure: I frequent private "blackhat" forums and although I do not participate in these activities, I blog about them anonymously. Furthermore, I know a few people (online) who do stuff similar to this with CPA content lockers, so I'll try and give you an educated guess. In general the average conversion rate in the TV show/live content is around 0.5-3% depending on the quality of traffic. Now, as you can see from Google Trends[1] some of these get very popular and trend once pretty much every year. In the second comparison, I've compared the search terms with a term I know is definitely popular to get relative popularity of the terms [2]. Comparing these two terms I can get an idea of the amount of traffic these website would get in the time period. I would estimate that the "big spammers" would easily get around 250k-500k uniques from multiple sources (spamming, mass advertising, social media, botnets etc). Assuming they get paid $2 every signup, and have a conversion rate of 1.5% with 300k uniques, it would bank them around $9k, of course I'm only talking about the big guys here who have done this for a long time. In general, I would say that the following is correct: Upper quartile average: $1-3k per day for a few days Lower quartile average: $50-60 per day for a few days Quick edit: It should also be noted that for these live games over 95% of the traffic will be from the USA hence the large profits. --------- [1]http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=Iowa%20vs%20Michigan%2C%20Seminoles%20vs%20Terrapins%2C%20Rutgers%20vs%20Cincinnati%2C%20Florida%20St%20vs%20Maryland&cmpt=q http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=Iowa%20vs%20Michigan%... [2]http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=Iowa%20vs%20Michigan%2C%20Seminoles%20vs%20Terrapins%2C%20Rutgers%20vs%20Cincinnati%2C%20Florida%20St%20vs%20Maryland%2C%20anonymous%20hack&cmpt=q http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=Iowa%20vs%20Michigan%...

ozi 14y ago

Since when was putting the selfish desires of a for-profit company ahead of your own well-being virtuous? This behavior is inherent to human nature, and presumably to everyone here who calls themselves a hacker. That Google doesn't "like" what I do has no moral or legal weight. The same goes for sites that accept user-generated content. Obviously not everybody who's a spammer is good at it or a true hacker, but I would venture a guess that most hackers are blackhat if they do SEO, simply because they see this as a system that can be exploited with controlled heuristic testing as apposed to some superfluous tools and a whack community a la seoMoz.org And it's not a zero-sum game. Google is forced to improve their natural language processing capabilities, their ability to execute more computationally expensive processing on massive amounts of content, so on and so forth, to try and keep up and provide a legitimate product. So back to the spamming; Any site that allows you to put a link on it is a target for seo, of course. Maximizing c-class IP diversity among links is important. But more importantly, these pages are usually Tier-1 to Tier-2 in link schemes as it's effective to point the low level forum spam at user-content generated sites with strong domain authority and funnel the juice to your primary site. They're basically just buffers. How long does it last? Varies greatly on how you're promoting it, the niche its in, etc. It doesn't always have to be "pump and dump" - I have multiple blogs over a year old that are alive and producing $1,200-$2,000 month each with almost no effort. When you can create just one of those blogs with about 10 hours worth of work (in total), there's obviously money to be made. And if you can write all of your own software to automate it, you can pretty much just "print money."

RealGeek 14y ago

Some of my friends make over $200,000 per month with spamming.