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
Check out these Ads and Click ones of Your Interest
Twitter: The Dark Side | EXPERIMENT 3 – Direct Messaging Value
Bots can even penetrate, slurp, gather, examine and share your private messages. So many services on Twitter offer revenue share models that are based on you twinking with an ad link in your tweet or place some value on occasional direct messaging.
For this experiment we simple sent a polite Direct Messages to 996 followers on one of our accounts: http://www.twitter.com/boblq. BobLq is a real human, Robert LaQuey, PhD, one of the authors of this Case Study and the 1,173 followers he has is a decent number. 996 DM is also quite a decent sample.
Out of 996 Direct Messages sent we registered:
- 105 IPA hits (BOTS vs. HUMANS analysis for Ex4 is in our Appendices or could be accesed by clicking here) on short URLs associated with the Twitter Demographic Poll out of which
- 46 clicks were made by humans or only 4.62% of all of boblq followers clicked / opened his polite, not-selling or advertisting direct message.
It might be interesting to see the Poll’s results. We asked a simple question again: "Please, tell us, fellow Twitterers, how old are you?" And these were the results:
Up to 15 5% (2 votes)
15 - 20 12% (5 votes)
21 - 25 12% (5 votes)
26 - 30 7% (3 votes)
31 - 40 35% (15 votes)
41 - 50 14% (6 votes)
Over 51 16% (7 votes)
It is also important to stress uselessness of tweeting with an idea of monetizing on number of followers. According to the NilsenWIre average time spent on Twitter is 17 minutes 21 seconds that represents only 1.20% of the day. Therefore, “followers” are being exposed to a tweet only while on-line and on Twitter – other tweets end up buried in the Twitter stream data. In boblq’s example that means that only 14 people out of 1,173 that “follow” him would be able to see his marketing tweet if they would care about it at all.
But the most fun of all was to create millions clicks on Bit.ly and NOT A SINGLE HUMAN!!!
PART XIX: MILLION CLICKS & ZERO HUMANS (in fact, 1,677,769 TOTAL CLICKS)
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