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 - EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
BACKGROUND
This Case Study provides a detailed analysis of numerous vulnerabilities of Bit.ly - the URL shortener chosen by Twitter, a Social Networking and microblogging service. Twitter is the buzz of the day despite or perhaps because of the fact that it has no revenue. Nevertheless with a recent investment of $100 million dollars received, Twitter has been valued as a billion-dollar venture.
Moreover, Twitter’s service limits how its users behave, how much they can say and how often they can say it. These limits, especially Twitter’s limitation of a post (“tweet”) to 140 characters has created a need for a URL shortener service i.e. a service that translate a long URL (Uniform Resource Locator) link into a short version of it that redirects a user to the original webpage. Therefore, the challenge of the Case Study was to analyze and measure the quantity, frequency and validity of clicks delivered by users to each other and by marketers and advertisers to clients on Twitter via Bit.ly.
METHODOLOGY
We set-up four Experiment Tasks that would invite, create, track and log clicks on Twitter / Bit.ly by:
using our own URL shortner Dac.im and
our Apache server logs while
measuring and comparing Bit.ly’s clicks statistic with our data and
with Google Analytics, Stat Counter & AdSense analytics data as
additional comparative analytics tools.
We also created and used various Twitter accounts and created and ran various robots to post on Twitter and Bit.ly. We compared and analysed all the data, looking at each and every IPA (Internet Protocol Address) recorded in logs for the purpose of determining a validity of each click i.e. is that click generated by a bot or by a human.
RESULTS
Many Twitter users, both corporate and individual, are uninformed regarding the true validity, value and measurement of clicks generated by Twitter activities directed at their target websites. The distorted mass media perceptions of the impact of Twitter when used as a marketing tool has mislead audiences on many levels. Our experiments have shown that:
Bit.ly under-reports raw numbers (total) of clicks for about 55%,
Bit.ly over-reports the number of human clicks for more than 95%,
Bit.ly does now show BOTS vs. HUMANS click ratio that goes up to 98% for automated, bots clicks and only 2% for human clicks,
Twitter’s number of followers on each account includes a huge number of robotic followers of no value for a human user whatsoever,
Twitter’s Direct Messaging as marketing tools is of no great value also; only 4.6% of users responded to a DM,
Bit.ly numerous vulnerabilities are best seen in our Experiment that produced 1,677,771 robotic clicks without a single human clicking on a short link created by Bit.ly and included in their “statistics”.
CONCLUSION
Quantitative results have shown that Bit.ly’s statistics are inaccurate at best and fraudulent at worst and that they do not discriminate between real and robotically generated automatic clicks with no actual human behind the click. Bit.ly statistics report only an aggregate number of clicks on any given link and therefore have almost no value for any Twitter user, be they an advertiser, a marketeer or individual selling products or services online.
RECOMMENDATIONS
Numerous Bit.ly’s security vulnerabilities and reporting inaccuracy point to an urgent need for the Standardization of the URL Shortener services that would include well defined and peer reviewed filtering of all shortened links and accurate reporting to prevent both click fraud and breaches of user’s privacy and security on-line.
PART II:
INTRODUCTION to On-line Social Networking
Licensees may copy, distribute, display and perform the work and make derivative works based on it only if they give the authors the credits and only for noncommercial purposes.
For on-line displays of the work and derivative works licensees must include SEO Artworks link as follows: http://www.seo-artworks.com/Twitter/twitter-study.htm.
SHARE YOUR THOUGHTS
