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I'm confused about the motivation here. Are the companies serving these ads running the bots, or paying others surreptitiously to run them? Why not just direc

• true_religion 12y ago
  There's two reasons that spring to mind: 1. The companies faking adviews don't directly control the ad management system, so they need to fake a page view on their servers in order to get the 3rd party ad manager (e.g. Doubleclick/Adsense) to record it. 2. The most obvious way of detecting fake traffic is to see that your ad click-through numbers don't match up with the actual traffic hitting your server. So to obfuscate this, you'll have your bot click through the advert then land on the advertisers page and spider through a few links before bouncing.
• fleitz 12y ago
  Click fraud works like this: 1) Make shitty blog 2) Put some ads on it 3) Buy some traffic 4) Buy some click fraud traffic 5) Profit. eg. If buzzfeed wants to make a little extra rev this month all they have to do is buy some click fraud traffic.