Click farm

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

A click farm is a form of click fraud in which a large group of low-paid workers are hired to click on paid advertising links for the click fraudster (click farm master or click farmer). The workers click the links , browse the target website for a while, and may sign up for newsletters before clicking another link. For many of these workers, clicking a sufficient number of ads per day can significantly increase their income and also be an alternative to other types of work. It is extremely difficult for an automated filter to identify this simulated traffic as fake, since the visitor behavior appears to correspond exactly to that of an actually legitimate visitor.

Fake likes generated by click farms are fundamentally different from those generated by bots , where computer programs are written by software experts. In order to deal with such problems, companies such as Facebook are developing algorithms that attempt to delete user accounts with unusual activity (e.g. "liking" too many pages in a short period of time).

logistics

Click farms are usually located in developing countries such as India , Nepal , Sri Lanka , Egypt , Indonesia , the Philippines and Bangladesh, but also in China . The click farming business extends to generating likes and followers on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter , Instagram , Pinterest and others. Employees receive an average of one US dollar for a thousand likes or for following a thousand users on Twitter.

Click farms sell the generated likes to their customers at a much higher price: According to the Daily Mail , "BuyPlusFollowers sold 250 Google+ likes for $ 12.95, InstagramEngine sold 1,000 Instagram followers for $ 12.00 and AuthenticHits sold 1,000 SoundCloud games for $ 9 , 00 dollars ".

In June 2017, a click farm with hundreds of cell phones and several hundred thousand SIM cards was discovered in Thailand , which were used to build likes and page views on WeChat .

There are two methods: the first is to hire competitor scammers to deplete the competitor's advertising budget so they can display their ads in higher pay-per-click rankings at a lower cost .

In this case, the competitor is weakened instead of being outbid in the pay-per-click bidding system. The click farm investment made by the fraudster is only a very small fraction of the amount the competitor loses.

The second option is to hire the Klickfarm staff to click on ads on the Klickfarmer's own website. In this way, the money that is lost to advertisers is won by the click farmer and not by the search engines and content networks as in the first method .

The need for click farming arises because, as The Guardian newspaper found, 31% of all users check ratings and reviews, including likes and Twitter followers, before deciding to buy something.

This shows the increasing importance that companies, celebrities and other organizations are placing on the number of their likes and followers. This in turn creates monetary value for likes and followers, which means that companies and celebrities are forced to increase their number of likes in order to create a positive online profile.

Pay-per-click providers like Google , Yahoo and, at the time, MSN are making significant efforts to combat click fraud. Automated filters remove most click fraud attempts at the source. Deanna Yick, a spokeswoman for Google in Mountain View , Calif. , Said that "we design our systems to intercept bot-related attacks."

Implications

Engagement rate, a performance metric that measures the quality of social media activities such as Facebook likes or Twitter retweets, can be interpreted in terms of "engagement per follower", measured by dividing the raw scores of social media activities by the number of followers.

Users who participate in short-term click farm services see their participation rate drop over time, as the initial increase in the volume of social media activities decreases with the end of the click farm services, combined with the increase in so-called Fake followers.

The Italian security researcher and blogger Andrea Stroppa and Carla De Micheli found in 2013 found that up to today's 40 million 360 dollars falsified by the sale and the potential benefits of buying Twitter followers were earned. At the time, fake Facebook activities made $ 200 million a year.

About 40 to 80 percent of Facebook advertising is bought on a pay-per-click basis. Advertisers have claimed that around 20 percent of Facebook clicks are invalid and they have tried to get refunds from Facebook.

Some companies have tried to mitigate the effects of click farming. Coca-Cola made its 2010 Super Bowl advertisement "Hard Times" private after it learned it was shared on Shareyt and issued a statement that it "disapproves of false fans".

Hasbro's attention was drawn to an online casino, a sub-licensee of its Monopoly brand had added fake Facebook likes and therefore reached out to Facebook to remove the website. Hasbro made a statement that it was "horrified to hear of the incidents" and claimed they had no prior knowledge of the site.

Reactions from advertisers

Facebook issued a statement stating, "A like that isn't from someone who is genuinely interested in connecting with the brand doesn't benefit anyone. If you run a Facebook page and someone offers you to To increase the number of your fans for money, we advise you not to do so - not least because it is against our rules and there is a high probability that such pages will be deleted from our automatic systems. We investigate and monitor "similar providers" , and if we discover that they are selling fake likes or generating conversations from fake profiles, we will quickly block them from our platform. "

Andrea Faville reported in 2014 that Alphabet Inc., Google and YouTube "will take action against bad users who try to tamper with our systems". LinkedIn spokesman Doug Madey said buying connections "dilutes members' experience, violates their user agreements, and can also result in account closure".

The CEO and founder of Instagram, Kevin Systrom , reports: "We have continuously deactivated Instagram spam accounts".

A first cleanup of fake likes and accounts from Facebook took place from August to September 2012. According to Facebook's 2014 financial report to the Securities and Exchange Commission, an estimated 83 million fake accounts were deleted, accounting for about 6.4% of the 1.3 billion accounts on Facebook at the time. Tech giant Dell lost 107,889 likes (2.87% of its total likes) in 24 hours. Billions of fake YouTube video views were deleted after being uncovered by auditors.

Instagram carried out a purge known as the "Instagram Rapture" that affected many accounts - including Instagram's own account, which lost 18,880,211 followers.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c Lee Munson: What is a Click Farm? . October 15, 2007. Retrieved January 10, 2017.
  2. ↑ Cotton Delo: Facebook Moves to Wipe Out Fake 'Likes,' But Can't Do Anything About Fat Fingers . August 31, 2012. Retrieved January 10, 2017.
  3. ↑ Facebook Is Riddled With Click Farms Where Workers Sit In Dingy Rooms, Bars On The Windows, Generating 1,000 Likes For $ 1 . August 2, 2013. Retrieved on January 10, 2017.
  4. ↑ a b Joop Rijk: The Click Farms Are Back; Now Producing Fake Likes, Followers and Views . August 5, 2013. Retrieved January 10, 2017.
  5. ↑ http://www.news.com.au/world/breaking-news/click-farm-raided-347200-sims-found/news-story/efb45fa8689f0a84c5a8626ea987a1f1
  6. ↑ a b c d Charles Arthur: How low-paid workers at 'click farms' create appearance of online popularity . August 2, 2013. Retrieved January 10, 2017.
  7. ↑ Microsoft Sues Over Online Advertising 'Click Fraud' . Bloomberg News . May 20, 2010. Archived from the original on May 25, 2015. Retrieved January 9, 2017.
  8. ↑ Kohki Yamaguchi: How to Calculate Engagement Rate for Social Media Marketing . May 13, 2016. Archived from the original on May 13, 2016. Retrieved January 10, 2017.
  9. ^ Fake Likes put Facebook in Hot Water with Advertisers. . Marketsmith, Inc .. February 21, 2014. Archived from the original on March 4, 2016. Retrieved on April 9, 2015.
  10. ↑ a b c Martha Mendoza: How Facebook Likes Get Bought And Sold . Associated Press . May 1, 2014. Archived from the original on January 7, 2014. Retrieved January 10, 2017.
  11. ↑ Jim Edwards: Here Are The Sealed Court Papers On 'Invalid Clicks' Facebook Doesn't Want You To See . November 5, 2012. Retrieved January 10, 2017.
  12. ^ Facebook - revenue and net income 2015 . Retrieved January 10, 2017.
  13. ↑ a b Dave Lee: Instagram deletes millions of accounts in spam purge . December 19, 2014. Retrieved January 10, 2017.
  14. ↑ a b Laura Stampler: These 20 Brands Lost The Most Facebook Likes The Day Of The Fake Fan Purge . October 5, 2012. Retrieved January 10, 2017.
  15. ↑ James Robinson: Money can't buy you love, but on Facebook it can buy you likes for anything . February 11, 2014. Retrieved January 10, 2017.
  16. ↑ Martha Mendoza: Want fans? Hire a social media 'click farm' . January 5, 2014. Retrieved January 10, 2017.