Clicks or Click Fraud?
Check out animation about millions of bots clicks show at Bit.ly as "statistics"
Twitter: The Dark Side Study
- EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
- INTRO to SOCIAL NETWORKING
- Human Society as Social Medium
- Networking at the Speed of Light
- Man I Need Coffee so Bad
- WELCOME to REAL-TIME WORLD
- The First Tweet?
- Businesses Emerge
- CLICK FRAUD - THE DARK SIDE
- URL Shortener
- Bit.ly’s Vulnerabilities
- Bit.ly – Twitter’s choice
- Tricky Analytics
- Twitter's ECO Footprint
- Are We Getting Stupider?
- Twitter Frenzy
- What Kind of Future with Twitter?
- EXPERIMENTS - Bit.ly Validity
- BOTS vs. HUMANS ratio
- BOTS vs. HUMANS by AdSense
- Insight Into Followers
- Bots Folllowing Bots Following Bots
- Christians Following Porn Bots
- Celebrities - Bots of the Worst Kind
- Celebrity Poluters
- Obama Girl?
- Direct Messaging Value
- MILLION CLICKS - ZERO HUMANS
- CONCLUSION
- Appendices
- BOTS vs. HUMANS IPA Analysis 1
- Followers Breakdown
- BOTS vs. HUMANS IPA Analysis 2
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Twitter: The Dark Side - CLICK FRAUD
The Dangers of Internet Advertising
There’s an incredible amount of data flowing all over the Internet; some of it are utter garbage, some is outright harmful, some extremely funny and/or valuable. How to find and define the value of any particular morsel of information (a twink, a value of link in a tweet, for example) is the puzzle we have worked hard to understand better in this Case Study.
Before getting down to the business and to nuts and bolts of Experiment(s) in our study let us briefly discuss the huge black market called “click fraud”.
Wikipedia states that a “click fraud is a type of Internet crime that occurs in pay per click online advertising when a person, automated script or computer program imitates a legitimate user of a web browser clicking on an ad, for the purpose of generating a charge per click without having actual interest in the target of the ad's link.”
These are murky waters. Dishonest publisher can employ click bots, specialized bots made to simulate clicking on an ad placed on his or her website / blog and defraud an advertiser. Even mighty Google cannot escape the click fraud entirely.
A Poster Child of Click Fraud
Check out Martin Fleischmann’s website @ http://mostchoice.com/; Mr. Fleischmann is the poster child of click fraud. He was defrauded by about $100,000.00 and was a public face of a click fraud victim. A collection of scams and deceptions inflate advertising bills for thousands of companies of all sizes, and his was one of these. That spreading scourge poses the single biggest threat to the Internet's advertising gold mine and is the most grueling problem facing Google and Yahoo, whose digital empires depend on all that gold.
It is estimated that up to 30% of all PPC programs payouts go to fraudsters. For a $30billion industry in 2010 in the U.S. alone that’s not a small change. "Advertisers should be concerned," says a former Yahoo manager who requested anonymity. "A well-executed click-fraud attack is nearly impossible, if not impossible, to detect.”
And now a new sensation, Twitter social networks have attracted millions of users and thousands and thousands of advertisers, marketers. There’s money to be made on Twitter and there’re people praying for innocent victims.
In Twitter case the story gets even more complicated with the advent of an URL shortener, a feature that makes Twitter Marketing possible.
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