
The new kings of YouTube botting - nols
http://kernelmag.dailydot.com/issue-sections/headline-story/15007/cheap-youtube-views/
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have_faith
The map of where the views come from is expected (Russia, India, South East
Asia).

The bit that I find most interesting is: > Vass says that he keeps
500views.com running by paying a monthly retainer to "a number of high-traffic
websites to have them run hidden scripts." >"The script contains the YouTube
link we need to increase views on..."

Looking at the map, you have to assume that the high-traffic websites are
specific to those regions. Otherwise you would expect IP addresses from other
countries to show up more often

Is there a (relatively) easy way of scraping for these malicious tags to
create a catalog of what websites are hosting the malicious code?

You could pay for the view boost service. Scrape the top 5,000 sites in those
regions of the world and hope your bot gets roped into being part of the
botnet (as you could identify the video you paid to boost). Just an idea.

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valarauca1
>Is there a (relatively) easy way of scraping for these malicious tags to
create a catalog of what websites are hosting the malicious code?

Better yet people do it for you. If you are running uBLOCK for FireFox, go
into its 3rd party filters to enable most Ad/Spamware/Analytic networks
depending on the filters you enabled.

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dcw303
Buying fake traffic removes the first hurdle. People are social, and
instinctively don't trust something that has not been endorsed. It's like
walking by an empty restaurant - you assume the food must be bad.

But it doesn't get you past the second hurdle. If you have bad content, no-one
is going to share it. Which means zero percent growth. Zero percent growth on
top of half a million paid-for views is still zero real visitors.

If you have good content and can ethically reconcile buying traffic, I guess
this tactic could work. But if you can't, you need a network of people to help
publicise your launch.

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z3t4
While I'm very aware of the social factor, I still use that heuristic. For
example when deciding what software package to install, I heavily base my
decision on amount of contributors and monthly downloads! (witch could be
easily faked).

Startup idea: Make a trusted, corruption free review site, with employed
reviewers.

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seibelj
My experience is that buying likes, views, installs, etc. works for niche
products that need to rise in rankings. You rise a few spots, then organic
kicks in, and you have just the edge needed to take over the competition.

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theseatoms
Edge, how so? Is the idea to catch competitors with their "marketing ->
marketshare" guard down?

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seibelj
Let's say you find some hyper-specific niche, like calculators for some
obscure section of the American tax code. Very, very useful for a small amount
of people. So you throw together an app in less than a day and put it on the
app store.

The market is so small, that there really isn't room for more than 1 app, and
it's so specific, people aren't going to really bother searching around. So
being the first or second app they see when they search "section XYZ tax
calculator" is critical to getting any installs.

As the app stores algorithms for thinly installed apps basically come to down
to total installs, followed by rating, followed by recent updates, paying $5
on fiver for a hundred installs can really make a difference. Once you rise
enough, people start finding you organically, they install, you rise higher,
and it becomes a feedback loop.

This is a contrived example, but if you can make apps and want to sling ads as
a way to earn money on the side, it can really help.

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meeper16
This is why I'd rather be a Google(YouTube) than facebook or twitter. Imagine
all the fake accounts, likes, bots, unknown spam that are giving us the next
geocities.

It's simply cheapens everything about social media in general.

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xzel
What is the difference between buying fake views/accounts/friends etc. or
backlinking and other SEO 'tricks'? Unfortunately for them, both companies
have to curate their product. For a google example, see the Rap Genius issue
from awhile back: [http://genius.com/Genius-founders-rap-genius-is-back-on-
goog...](http://genius.com/Genius-founders-rap-genius-is-back-on-google-
annotated)

