India's Secret Army Of Online Ad 'Clickers'

TI-99/4A's RULE writes "Just when I thought I'd heard everything, I just read that, according to The Times of India, there are hordes of people in India clicking pay per click ads for a share of the CPC earnings. Have we gone back to the dotcom boom days again where people are tossing money away on stuff like this? Or is this just a temporary blip, with paid-per action sites like CurrentCodes representing more of a norm in online marketing?"

Darn Outsourcing!

I had to hire my Ad-Clicking replacement today!

Re:Darn Outsourcing!

You think that's bad, I spent 2 months training my Ad-Clicking replacment!

Re:Darn Outsourcing!

You think that's bad, I spent 2 months building a robot and then 2 months training it to be my Ad-Clicking replacement!

There is nothing a PS2 and a copy of vice city can't cure -- PA

Re:Darn MMORPGs!

> You think that's bad, I spent 2 months building a robot and then 2 months training it to be my Ad-Clicking replacement!

You think that's bad? I spent $49.99 plus $15/month for a subscription to Star Wars Galaxies and Evercrack. And that's on top of the $1.00/day I pay the Indians to mindlessly click the mouse button and grind out the characters and camp the spawns for the gold I sell on eBay.

Ah, I love the 'net and how it lets anyone out the middleman! I mean, by using banner ads, I can cut out 90% of my cost overhead by doing away with the MMORPG part of the business plan altogether. Stupid MMORPGs!

Re:Darn Identity Thieves!

"A girl robot!

This is going to be the best prom ever!"

All in a days work in India

After a hard day of handling Dell's support calls or writing code for a Fortune 500 firm, the ever- intrepid worker from India troops home to click on overseas (read:American) ads for just a few more bucks before heading off to bed...

Happy Trails!

Erick

Re:All in a days work in India

Is it me, or isn't this one of those jobs that could further be outsourced, to um, I don't know, a script maybe?

Re:All in a days work in India

Not really. The beauty of doing it from home is the clicks are distributed, the greatness of using people is their inherant unpredictability - they will click through. COmpanies that pay-per-click use sophisticated analysis to work out what is a script (and happily withhold payment if they think one is being used) - if you work out a truely undpredictable script that is intuitive enough to click through or face 'challenges' deliberately put in ads, and implement this on a wide range of IPs then you will have made millions and broken internet advertising as we know it!

Re:All in a days work in India

Ok, then, use a distributed client... rent peoples CPU time, and run the script on millions of PC's.

Re:All in a days work in India

Or a virus. "Borrow" millions of PC's to click through ads and sell spam relays on the side.

Outsourced?

Now where in America did those jobs come from?

Re:Outsourced?

Poor bastards must be on the streets now, holding signs: "My ad-clicking revenue went to india - please help - will click ads for food".

Daniel

Do they actually sit there clicking?

If they aren't smart enough to write a little script to do it for them, I'm less worried about my job being offshored.

In India...

Perhaps in India people are cheaper than a script sufficeintly sophisticated to slip thru the "Click Protection" of PPC advertisers.

Mind you Overtures' Click Protection [perlworks.com] leaves a lot to desired.

Re:In India...

Thats just a silly statement. "Click Protection" is merely a matter of throwing away cookies and sessions and changing the User-Agent string to be a valid browser.

All those things you can do with wget.

I think they're probably doing this for legal reaons since they are real-life humans clicking on each link... so that they don't get sued or brought up on fraud charges for "enhancing" their click count.

Re:Do they actually sit there clicking?

"If they aren't smart enough to write a little script to do it for them, I'm less worried about my job being offshored."

Did you consider it might be cheaper to hire people to click the ads than to contract a company to write such a script? Its kinda like how the American military often threw up their arms after destroying various Vietnamese infrastructure during that conflict. They'd blow up a bridge, only to find it reconstructed a few days labor thanks to what the Pentagon defined as "ant labor." The Western business-minded viewpoint would factor in contracts, heavy industry, materials, and all the like into costs, whereas a more simple society would just get a ton of unskilled workers out there to assemble the project (instead of relying on earth moving equipment). Or maybe a better example would be the Minnonites and the Amish in terms of barn raisings.

Re:Do they actually sit there clicking?

When I was in India (admittedly, 10 years ago) there were people crouching in the middle of the street painting the yellow lines. Scared the hell out of me, considering how my taxi driver was driving.

I guess it was cheaper than buying a truck with a paint brush attached.

Re:Do they actually sit there clicking?

Back in 2000, a friend of mine used to leave his computer turned on 24/7 with that stupid AllAdvantages software showing up lots of ads. He expected to make hundreds of dollars, as advertised.

After 4 months of extreme adclicking, he received a U$35,00 and was not very happy about the amount, but decided to cash it anyway. We are from Brazil, so when we need to cache a check from US, we need to go to Citibank. There, they charged him U$70,00 to cash the check. I had the biggest laugh of my life and he thought about a lawsuit AllAdvantages, but I told him that the lawyers would charge him a lot more than the money he wanted to receive.

It's the 90s again...

It reminds me of a 1990s-era site called FreeRide which awarded "points" that were redeemable for prizes for visiting sponsor sites. It was even to the point that you could earn points for searching Google and other search engines, as they were even willing to pay per click back then.

Somehow, I don't think this is going to last very long. Anybody who's working on a Pay-Per-Click basis without a way to shut this kind of "unqualified lead" down is going to get wiped out very quickly...

Re:It's the 90s again...

since there would be no automated way to detect the difference between a human who's actaully interested and a human who'd just hired to look interested.

How about the fact that the uninterested folks never buy things? If they just switch to using pay-per-sale (or whatever it's called) rather than pay-per-click or pay-per-view, they won't get scammed

make rupees fast!

Why, type in 'earn rupees clicking ads' in Google? you get 25,000 results.

Swell, even AllAdvantage.com is outsourcing.

Yeah, I know their gone

Show me the Money

Anyone have a Perl script to generate click throughs automatically - parse a set of pages of know web page add payers and generate hits while I'm sleeping? If so post it here and I'll split the profits with you. :-]

After that you'll need to gather a pool of developers on sourceforge for any would be counter measures that could be used by the click thorough payers. And who said that America is loosing its scientific talent [slashdot.org].

Re:Conversions

EXACTLY!

Funny how this follows on so close to the article about the BBC on-demand video experiment. The issue is the same, people are trying to impose old, outdated print media advertising concepts onto the Internet.

Click-throughs are (IMHO) a better measure of ad effectiveness than are the magazine subscription numbers (or Neilson ratings) by a long shot, but click-throughs are not perfect. What *IS* perfect is to measure how many people actually BUY the product being advertised.

This is conceptually quite easy to do. With each ad needs to come some sort of incentive, either to buy the product right now, while viewing the ad, or some sort of unique coupon number than will (for example) entitle the bearer to a discount when buying the product later. Even the print and TV advertisers figured this one out years ago. The Internet makes it much easier.

Stop measuring click-throughs and start measuring buy-throughs.

Great!

When I thought I was onto something I find my job is, once again, outsourced to India!!!
Perhaps I should work on plan B, clicking spam links to boost spammers confidence.

Been wanting to say this for days....

When I thought I was onto something I find my job is, once again, outsourced to India!!!

DEY TOOK AHR JAHBS!!

Re:Been wanting to say this for days....

For those of you that don't get it, its a reference to the latest South Park episode where people from the future come to South Park and offer to work for pennies on the dollar. There's a whole bunch of red-necks that get together and say "They took our jobs" in various redneck ways.

Quite funny, even though I swear they were making fun of Indians and not Mexicans at first. You know... coding PHP/Java for $5/hr.

THAY TOOK MY JAWB!!!

Its a sad day

When even punching the monkey gets outsourced.

Re:Its a sad day

Let's not be hasty here.

I for one know that 'punching the monkey' is still very much a domestic function performed at the goldspider household.

Re:Its a sad day

There's this place down the road from me, I hear, where you can outsource punching the monkey.

Oh wait, you said punching. Nevermind.

Re:Its a sad day

> When even punching the monkey gets outsourced.

It aint sad yet - wait till they outsource spanking it too.

Re:Its a sad day

I earned about $250 worth of certificates from FreeRide.com, most of which were Amazon or CDNow certificates. Pretty much everyone in my office did it, we were that bored. It was how we started each morning.

Of course toward the end it got worse and worse, but they never did fix some security 'problems' that would let you get multiple clicks per ad. The system was setup to only allow you ~10 ad clicks per day in the main section, but depending on how fast a person could click, you could get from 2-50 + clicks registered off the right banners, preferably 10-point ones. You could get a $20 cert in a matter of days.

Of course that's probably why they went under... I still don't get how they really made money in the first place. I doubt they ever turned anything resembling a profit.

/Still wishing I hadn't used my real e-mail address to sign up for FreeRide...

People are always ready to toss money on ads

Ever buy the Sunday paper? First thing you do is dump the 8 pounds of glossy color ads in the nearest garbage can. Everyone knows this, but the advertisers still line up every week to pay for their ads to end up in a landfill.

The same is true with internet ads...They have to pay by click or view or something. There isn't any way around it, that's how all adds are sold.

At least we've finally outsourced a crappy job.

I bought the paper for those glossy ads

My wife has me pick up the Sunday paper for the coupons. The news gets dumped in the trash because we read it online already.

I look at those ads -- willingly, & buy stuff,

I mean, I buy stuff, too, and the Sunday inserts are a great way to check prices on stuff, and see what's generally on sale or otherwise discounted.

I'm as anti-advertising as the next guy, but this is the best kind of advertising -- I can opt-in if I want to, they print prices, have pictures, you can comparison shop on a lot of things, no cookies, spyware, sales associates or other annoyances.

If only all commerce was this enjoyable.

Re:People are always ready to toss money on ads

My wife is one of those coupon clippers, she manages to save about $30.00 a month for maybe an hours work total. That's not bad.

Hell I even go through the techie adds, Best Buy, CompUSA, Circuit City, et. al. to see if they have any good deals for the week. I've picked up many a computer game for $30 bucks that's retailling at the other outlets for $40 or more. So don't discount the sunday paper.

Ethics

An Indian advertising executive quoted in the article feels that this practice of making a lot of money clicking on ads is unethical. Why? The people are being paid to do exactly what they are doing. The ones interviewed for this article were not using any kind of script or other automated click simulator. This is the downside of massive, untargeted advertising. You never know who you're going to reach or if your message is the slightest bit effective.

Cue Simpsons

Lisa: Shouldn't you be working?
Homer: I've got someone to cover for me.
[Camera shows drinking bird repeatedly pressing 'Y' on the keyboard.]

Thanks to SNPP [snpp.com].

Where is the money coming from?

Advertisers? Definitely won't last long. Marketing loves to spend money on new ideas, but any business that lets them run amok without any cost to results will go bankrupt.

I wonder if this click-happy group also clicks on virus-laden emails. To me, that would be far more frightening -- hundreds of thousands of infected machines in India pouring spam through a multitude of ISPs. Yuck.

Current Codes?

WTF does that have to do with your story? Sounds like someone just wanted to drive extra traffic to their deal site with an unrelated link in the story.

your next job

will be to move this pile of rocks to that corner of the room. When you are done, report to me for your next assignment which will involve one of the other three corners of the room, and a similar pile of rocks. at the end of the day, report how many piles of rocks you set up, and how many piles of rocks you moved.

Stupid Interweb.

So 90

The 90's called, they want their clicks back.

Re:So 90

The 80's called, they want their saying back.

Clicking? Bah!

I just forward that email from Microsoft and AOL, I'm told that I'll get tons of money very soon.. Silly people actually clicking on ads for money..

This could be good

So if people are abusing CPC ads to get more money, that means the advertiser is paying more and getting less real exposure. Theoritically they would see this on thier bottom line.

If this continues then what exactly happens? I figure 2 possible scenarios:

1. Do advertisers realize that cost per click just isn't worth it and go to another model?
-Or-
2.Do they realize that banner ads aren't an effective medium, and we see a decrease of banner ads instead?

How silly!

I can see it now.. "Well Jim it appears most people interseted in buying *insert product* are from India. Let's focus our advertising there."

Back in the boom days...

My old company, MarketSource, used to run this website called Ontap.com, which was billed as "the place where college students live online". (Yeah, I know that if you go there now it's a liquor distributor or somesuch, which is actually closer to what college students actually do, but I digress..)

Anyhow, the management had this notion that they could pay for everything with online advertising. Who wouldn't want to run ads aimed at the very lucrative college crowd? And we were paid per ad impression!

Of course, the money coming in wasn't as much as was hoped for by management. Trouble was, nobody was visiting the site. So someone came up with the bright idea of refreshing ads every 30 seconds or so. Which also led to the plea from management to "leave your computer on 24/7 with your browser opened to our site". Kinda like using a thimble to bail out the Titanic, but hey....

This also led to discussion where management would say things like, "We need to make X new feature as complicated as possible... instead of doing it in 3 pages, let's do it in 7 cos then we'll serve more ads".

The only good thing that ever came out of that site was the fact we sent a famous midget (Verne Troyer) off to some 17 year old girl's prom. I hope he didn't hump her like he did the laser in APII.

Re:Back in the boom days...

1. This also led to discussion where management would say things like, "We need to make X new feature as complicated as possible... instead of doing it in 3 pages, let's do it in 7 cos then we'll serve more ads".

I'm curious. What is it like working at Tom's Hardware these days?

Perl script jobs being outsourced!

It seems that not only human jobs are outsourced to India, but Perl script jobs as well.

Next time one of my Perl programs starts giving me problems I'll tell it to behave or it'll get replaced by an Indian worker.

Seems like the classic "Go away or I'll replace you with a very small shell script" T-shirt now gets a sequel!

As an Indian, I tell you...

You should be wary of anything Times of India reports. Once a premier newspaper, it has reduced to a tabloid and semi porn website now.

Case in point, assuming you get paid $0.25 per click as the article reports, that amounts to $180 an hour (assuming you click 1 ad per 5 seconds)!! Thats insane, even by american standards. In India where a average guy gets $300 a month salary, that figure is damn near impossible.

Re:As an Indian, I tell you...

the article mentions that you have to stay on the page for ~60 seconds.

I'm going one step beyond this

I'm putting tiny little electrical generators in each mouse, and generating electricity with each click. One hundred million Indians clicking at the same time should be enough to power Toledo.

Ahh, the good ol' days of getting $$ from clicks..

Used to run a warez FTP in IRC back in the day.

Had the ol' "To get into my site, visit this URL [url to paying click site] and search for "shampoo". The first word of the second paragraph + the third word of the fouth paragraph of the first item listed is the password to get in."

I'd rack up like $100 a week for like 2 months. I couldn't believe it worked, but looking back on it, it's unbelievable I never got caught.

Too late

I told all you ad-clickers out there to unionize but now it is too late. All you shoe shiners and bootlickers better watch out, or the next thing you know they will be shipping your boss' shoes to India! Unionized now before it is too late!!!

This is almost as senseless as a Wired article

Can no one else smell the BS? This is almost as stupid as when Wired's "jargonwatch" claimed that people all over the US were saying "jithead".

Who is paying 25 cents per click? With programmers at WiPro earning, say, $1000 US per month .. that's just 4,000 clicks, or 150 per day. Right.

The article's claim that searching for earn rupees clicking ads [google.com] returns 25,000 results is off by a factor of 10.

And, finally, it's "CPM", not "CPC".

Maybe this is why...

...those Ad people think their ads really are reaching people.

In Other News...

In a quest for more clicks, and to get rid of the middleman, penis enlargement firms begin hiring paid clickers on site.

Mr. Smith from ManGro Technologies explains, "Since the clicks will be coming directly from our own servers we save on bandwidth, and at the same time oversee the entire clicking process, effectively paying substantially less for each click".

According to industry estimates, 1 out of 100 clicks is a buy. "Basically Increasing clicks, means increasing business.", Mr. Smith adds, "As well as the size of your penis."

4. Profit$$

The pay per click ads are just the warm-up.

What they're really banking on is damages awarded for their carpal tunnel syndrome lawsuits.

The Dalai LLama
...damn, we're outsourcing SCO's gig...

why not created a distributed network of clickers

Someone should create a distributed client (like SETI@home or something) that sends "clicks" to these places and cuts the person a portion of the payments in the form of micropayments or something.

As for India doing this en-masse - let them. If they want to enter a dot-com boom like the US/Europe had in the 90's, let them learn the hard way. I think I'll open an investment account in India and I'll buy low and sell high again. This time, however, I'll be sure to bail early on and not ride the wave up to $100/per share stocks for things like furniture.com.

In this way, they can have my outsourced job, and I can profit from it by being a Day Trader all over again.

Woo hoo!

Click here instead :-P

http://www.thehungersite.com/cgi-bin/WebObjects/CT DSites [thehungersite.com]

I'm sure there are other sites like that too.

(go here [theanimalrescuesite.com] if you like animals more than people... lol)

Take away their computers.

That's it. Time to take away all of India's computers. All they do is sit around all day trying to make something for nothing on the internet, provide crappy tech support, and pirate Microsoft software and copyrighted music and movies. No wait... that's what I do all day : /

Mao Tzedung is outdated...

isn't the guy who said: "What would happen to the world if all the chinese people step down from a bench at the same time?"

This should now be read:

"What would happen to the NYSE and the NASAQ if all the indian people would click the mouse at the same time?"

Chinese wisdom has been surpassed by Indian wisdom...

I suspect there's an even better solution...

Sites like TicketMaster use captchas -- images of slightly distorted words which are hard for computers to interpret, but simple for humans -- to prevent spammers and bots from using (abusing) their services. I think some blog softwares have these simlple Turing tests built in as well.

Spammers and bot masters have come up with an incredibly simple solution, though. Pr0n.

Throw up a website with twenty or thirty thousand high-quality, free pr0n images. The catch? You have to type in the characters or words displayed in a captcha for every 'n' pr0n images.

Instant, distributed, human captcha OCR. If your pr0n site has heavy enough traffic, you can do this distributed captcha OCR fairly quickly -- sometimes in under a minute.

Why not do the same thing here. (Referer:? How to track the click @ the pr0n site? (JavaScript (a la WebTrends SDC?))).

I'm not sure of the details, but I suspect it would work.