India's Secret Army Of Online Ad 'Clickers' 297
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! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Darn Outsourcing! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Darn Outsourcing! (Score:4, Funny)
There is nothing a PS2 and a copy of vice city can't cure -- PA
Re:Darn MMORPGs! (Score:5, Funny)
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! (Score:5, Funny)
This is going to be the best prom ever!"
All in a days work in India (Score:5, Funny)
Happy Trails!
Erick
Re:All in a days work in India (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:All in a days work in India (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:All in a days work in India (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:All in a days work in India (Score:5, Insightful)
Someone did that to us (Score:3, Informative)
Turing Test Arms Race / Evolution in Action (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:All in a days work in India (Score:2)
The internet sucks now that the businesses and marketing types learnt about it, I wonder how many domain names out there which are just placeholders for an ad-serving page.
Re:All in a days work in India (Score:2)
Re:All in a days work in India (Score:2)
Outsourced? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Outsourced? (Score:2)
Re:Outsourced? (Score:5, Funny)
Daniel
Re:Outsourced? (Score:2, Interesting)
Turns out you were supposed to run spamming software for a guy.
Do they actually sit there clicking? (Score:5, Funny)
In India... (Score:5, Insightful)
Mind you Overtures' Click Protection [perlworks.com] leaves a lot to desired.
Re:In India... (Score:4, Interesting)
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:In India... (Score:3, Informative)
Its quite difficult to get lots of unique IP address to register a click from. (without open proxies). But yeah, a script running from many different IPs would be the same as a person 'running' from many different IPs. But perhaps they use people cause that way they can actually 'hire' i
Re:Do they actually sit there clicking? (Score:5, Insightful)
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? (Score:3, Interesting)
I had a similar experience recently that made me aware of my Western ideas about labor. My company was in the process of building a new plant in China (for goods to be delivered in China only, no exports). Several IT people went over to help them get their infrastructure setup. There was a large safe in the area that was to become the datacenter. The safe needed to be taken out of th
Re:Do they actually sit there clicking? (Score:5, Insightful)
I guess it was cheaper than buying a truck with a paint brush attached.
Re:Do they actually sit there clicking? (Score:5, Interesting)
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... (Score:5, Insightful)
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... (Score:3, Funny)
They need to IP ban/blackhole India. Not only do they stop the fake clicking, but they bring back all the other jobs that were lost.
hey, I should get a patent on this.
Re:It's the 90s again... (Score:4, Insightful)
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
Re:It's the 90s again... (Score:3, Interesting)
Assume I'm honest and don't hire "Click Through Inflators (TM)", and I make a business deal to post XYZ's ad on my site. (Just play along... I don't have ads on my site.)
User N clicks on it and visits XYZ.
They look around, and are interested, but need time to think about it.
They bookmark the page, or just make a mental note of the site.
Now they close the browser, clear the cookies, terminate the connection, and go t
Re:It's the 90s again... (Score:3, Insightful)
Just like people can bookmark a page after clicking on it and come ba
make rupees fast! (Score:5, Funny)
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 (Score:3, Funny)
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:Show me the Money (Score:3, Funny)
#!/usr/bin/perl
while (1) {
my $a = int rand (255) + 1;
my $b = int rand (255) + 1;
my $c = int rand (255) + 1;
my $d = int rand (255) + 1;
`wget --referer-url=$a.$b.$c.$d http://whoever.com/ads`;
}
Re:Show me the Money (Score:2)
Re:Show me the Money (Score:3, Interesting)
Conversions (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Conversions (Score:4, Insightful)
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! (Score:5, Funny)
Perhaps I should work on plan B, clicking spam links to boost spammers confidence.
Been wanting to say this for days.... (Score:5, Funny)
DEY TOOK AHR JAHBS!!
Re:Been wanting to say this for days.... (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Been wanting to say this for days.... (Score:5, Informative)
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 (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Its a sad day (Score:5, Funny)
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 (Score:5, Funny)
Oh wait, you said punching. Nevermind.
Re:Its a sad day (Score:5, Funny)
It aint sad yet - wait till they outsource spanking it too.
Re:Its a sad day (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
People are always ready to toss money on ads (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Re:People are always ready to toss money on ads (Score:3, Interesting)
Not in all cases...Sometimes advertisers just pay to have their ad appear on a prominent section of a popular page. They know the ad will be seen by tons of people and have paid for just that.
In these cases, the only thing clicks would do is eat up the advertiser's bandwidth... Hrmmm...Is that a bad thing?
Re:People are always ready to toss money on ads (Score:2)
I bought the paper for those glossy ads (Score:4, Interesting)
I look at those ads -- willingly, & buy stuff, (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:People are always ready to toss money on ads (Score:3, Funny)
Actually the ads are the part of the paper where I find the least amount of lies
Re:People are always ready to toss money on ads (Score:3, Interesting)
Really.
Ethics (Score:5, Insightful)
Cue Simpsons (Score:5, Funny)
Where is the money coming from? (Score:5, Interesting)
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? (Score:5, Interesting)
your next job (Score:5, Funny)
Stupid Interweb.
Who normally signs up for these things ANYWAY?? (Score:2)
So 90 (Score:4, Funny)
Re:So 90 (Score:4, Funny)
Shell script (Score:2, Funny)
Clicking? Bah! (Score:5, Funny)
This could be good (Score:3, Interesting)
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?
Hopefully.. (Score:2)
hopefully they are advertisers for products usually sold in spam(large johnson etc.). This should really hurt their bottom line.
How silly! (Score:5, Funny)
Back in the boom days... (Score:5, Interesting)
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... (Score:5, Funny)
I'm curious. What is it like working at Tom's Hardware these days?
do the math (Score:2, Insightful)
(and that's when you get ripped off for everything)
for a local vilaager (forgive PCness, lack of) half that amount is hansome.
I guess that someday the bottom will drop out.
but untill that day , some money can change hands from some corporations to some people who truely deserve it (i figure if i were 12, i'd be willing to sit for three hours , opening and closing tabs(firefox) for ~10,000 clicks )
(I guess these sites can prevent scripts, otherwise we'
Inefficient... (Score:2)
-Don.
Perl script jobs being outsourced! (Score:5, Funny)
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... (Score:5, Informative)
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... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:As an Indian, I tell you... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:As an Indian, I tell you... (Score:2)
Re:As an Indian, I tell you... (Score:3, Interesting)
Or the article is complete crap. Which could be too.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:As an Indian, I tell you... (Score:2)
Sounds like you tried pretty hard though.
I'm going one step beyond this (Score:4, Funny)
Ahh, the good ol' days of getting $$ from clicks.. (Score:5, Interesting)
Had the ol' "To get into my site, visit this URL [url to paying click site] and search for "shampoo". The first word of the second paragraph + the third word of the fouth paragraph of the first item listed is the password to get in."
I'd rack up like $100 a week for like 2 months. I couldn't believe it worked, but looking back on it, it's unbelievable I never got caught.
ohhohoho ! (Score:2, Informative)
Lots of PPC companies have affiliate programs and some lowlifes are running "get paid to surf" programs. You have to go to sites, and sign up, or just click the ads and receive a % of the click.
Also there are the clickbots, which are created to generate hundreds of clicks (and no sales of course) on the competitions's ads, until they give up ads.
Newver run expen
Can I subcontract the work? (Score:2)
Too late (Score:5, Funny)
This is almost as senseless as a Wired article (Score:5, Informative)
Who is paying 25 cents per click? With programmers at WiPro earning, say, $1000 US per month
The article's claim that searching for earn rupees clicking ads [google.com] returns 25,000 results is off by a factor of 10.
And, finally, it's "CPM", not "CPC".
How long till 419 scams get outsourced to India? (Score:2)
Web advertising will become like TV advertising (Score:2)
Maybe this is why... (Score:4, Insightful)
In Other News... (Score:3, Funny)
Mr. Smith from ManGro Technologies explains, "Since the clicks will be coming directly from our own servers we save on bandwidth, and at the same time oversee the entire clicking process, effectively paying substantially less for each click".
According to industry estimates, 1 out of 100 clicks is a buy. "Basically Increasing clicks, means increasing business.", Mr. Smith adds, "As well as the size of your penis."
4. Profit$$ (Score:5, Funny)
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...
I did something like this before (Score:2, Interesting)
The system can easily be fixed (Score:2)
why not created a distributed network of clickers (Score:3, Interesting)
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 (Score:5, Informative)
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. (Score:4, Funny)
Mao Tzedung is outdated... (Score:3, Funny)
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... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Ive heard of this in the states (Score:2, Funny)
Little did you now that he would become the CEO of SCO and would just be a salaryman..