
How I Made Money Spamming Twitter with Contextual Book Suggestions - hoop
http://blog.charleshooper.net/how-i-made-money-spamming-twitter-with-contex
======
mike-cardwell
I'm surprised more people aren't speaking against what you did... I guess
people aren't too bothered about spam until it gets above a certain threshold,
and I guess it's only Twitters money that people like you are wasting by
abusing their services and breaking their T&C's

~~~
akkartik
The only mention of spam I see in Twitter's ToS: "You may not interfere with
the access of any user, including sending a virus, overloading, flooding,
spamming, mail-bombing the Services, or by scripting the creation of Content
in such a manner as to interfere with or create an undue burden on the
Services." <http://twitter.com/tos>

No mention of "unsolicited replies". Heck, for most early users, _all_
@replies on twitter are unsolicited. Most of the time I have an exchange with
someone before I follow them. Twitter's just designed to be more promiscuous
than email. Anybody can see your tweets, so you're encouraging strangers with
insight to jump in.

I think that makes what he did a grey area. Depends on how good his
recommendations are, basically.

~~~
hoop
Hi akkartik,

You make a good point, however Twitter's ToS was quite different back then.
Their current TOS was updated: September 18, 2009 (this date can be found at
the bottom of today's TOS)

That's around the same time my bot was suspended and Twitter's spam rates
started to drop from ~10% to 1%

~~~
akkartik
Hmm, so they made their ToS _looser_ around the time they booted you? That
doesn't make sense..

I'm not sure there's any disagreement here. I'm just saying: I think what you
did would require human judgement to kick no matter how they write their ToS.

~~~
hoop
It's not just that they changed their TOS. They also started to take a
stronger stance against spam. In addition to publicly announcing "we WILL
actively suspend the accounts of spammers" they followed through and probably
beefed up their anti-spam staff.

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aspam
Posted from a throwaway account.

I make about 400 EUR every month from Amazon referals without actively doing
anything.

I own a comunity fueld site (hosting pictures) that receives about 70k visits
(20k unique) per month. Its just a little hobby project that runs itself and
has been unchanged for 2 or 3 years now. It's hard to find advertisers due to
the sometimes offensive content, let alone making money from banner ads.

So I did the next logical thing: putting an invisible iframe on the site that
loads Amazon with my referal id. Anyone who visits my site and decides to go
shoppind on Amazon in the next few days, still has this referal id stored in a
cookie. Note that I don't actually link to Amazon anywhere. Conversion is
soley based on chance.

My conversion rate is about 0.5% and I've been doing this for about 18 month
now.

~~~
japherwocky
hoop saw similar things with his affiliate links; a lot of the sales didn't
come from the books he recommended, but once people were on amazon they'd end
up buying something.

~~~
imp
That's much different though. Those people were at least manually clicking on
the amazon links and not having their cookie stuffed secretly in the
background. I have a low-traffic book review website that makes $2/month from
Amazon affiliates, and around Christmas someone bought a Kindle and I got
credit for that, which was a nice surprise. All I ever linked to were books,
but if someone starts browsing around Aamzon then you'll get credit for
whatever they end up buying.

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ohashi
All I can say is, nice work. It's creative. I've made some decent money off
affiliate programs and twitter. What you're doing is similar in nature to what
a lot of people are doing (human and bot).

~~~
hoop
Thanks for your feedback!

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Sukotto
This is an excellent example of the kind of advertising I actually don't mind
getting.

1) Directly related to something I just said I wanted

2) You never advertise to me more than once.

I wish more advertisers (or even spammers) worked this way.

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rb2k_
Trying the website resulted in this:

    
    
      We recommended these books based on the following terms:
      schon, only, when, that
    

It's really weird that any of the suggestions made sense when words like these
aren't blocked. The "schon" is German, but the rest should really not play
into any ratings

~~~
hoop
Hi, thanks for the feedback!

Apparently my corpus isn't a large enough size to naturally filter out useless
words like the ones you listed so I have added stopword filtering. Give it
another shot and see how it works for you.

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DotSauce
Here's a legitimate way to make money from affiliate programs on Twitter. I
make modest commissions each month via @ThemeHunter without promoting.

[http://www.dotsauce.com/2009/10/28/affiliate-id-rss-feed-
yah...](http://www.dotsauce.com/2009/10/28/affiliate-id-rss-feed-yahoo-pipes/)

------
ritonlajoie
Even if it is spam , this kind of idea always amaze me.And everytime, I am
jealous to not having thinking about it before..

How many of these bots are spamming twitter already ?

~~~
hoop
While I haven't seen any numbers, I think that there are alot of these bots. I
have even less of an idea if any of them are contextual alot. Right before I
was suspended, I believe that there was a report that came out that suggested
that a large percentage of Twitter's traffic was caused by spam bots like
these. I'll see if I can find the report and verify the numbers!

What I do know is that there are certain keywords that put you in line to be
tweeted at for some product or website. Some keywords have more bots trolling
the search API than others.

UPDATE: I wasn't able to find the report I was looking for, but I did find the
following blog post. It contains a graph that shows that SPAM used to account
for about 10% of Twitter's traffic. This number is now below 1%.

<http://blog.twitter.com/2010/03/state-of-twitter-spam.html>

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fno
That is a great idea and I do not find it too spammy. Twitter could implement
something like that themselves as advertisement (simple context aware text
ads).

~~~
hoop
It appears that Twitter is starting to move in this direction. I recently read
that they now embed what they call "Promoted Tweets" (another word for an ad)
in their search results. I'm wondering how long it will be before these start
showing up in our timelines.

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joe-mccann
I did this a long time ago, almost the exact same thing, but I actually parsed
trending topics and searched Amazon for ANY product, not just books, based on
the content of the trending topic. I started out with books, but moved on to
all products. It was a cool project and netted me some cash but not worth
carrying on so I dumped it about a year ago.

Was actually incredibly easy to do. I'm sure there are loads more out there.

~~~
hoop
Very cool. I hadn't thought of seeding the recommendations with trending
topics. What kind of conversion rate did you get?

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nerfhammer
What did an actual recommendation tweet look like?

~~~
hoop
Hi nerfhammer,

They started out like "@{{user}} You should read {{book title}} {{shortened
book url}}" but many people would take offense if the recommendation wasn't a
very good one or the book touched on a sensitive subject (like weight.)

I had much better results with "@{{user}} Have you read {{book title}}?
{{shorted book url}}"

------
Vivtek
Upvoted for finally naming that algorithm I've been off-and-on trying to
research for the last year or so. Thank you!

~~~
hoop
Hah, thank japherwocky for that one!

------
xulescu
Interesting idea (to suggest based on already written content). Maybe it would
be considered less "spammy" if it would be just semi-automated, i.e. more like
an "expert system". Also, it it would work for popular forums like PHP BB or
others, would greatly extend it's usage (so not just on Twitter).

~~~
hoop
Hi there,

That's a great idea. I hadn't thought about plugging it into a bulletin board
system, but did think about trying to plug it into facebook. A recommendation
engine plugin for phpbb, etc could definitely make the forum operator some
additional revenue.

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nowarninglabel
My keywords: "with, from, have, that"

I think the algorithm could use some work.

Also, the book suggestions are greyed out/faded. Makes me think there aren't
any suggestions, you should make the icons come through in full color.

~~~
hoop
Sadly, I lost my corpus some time ago so until I pull more data from Twitter
(I've got a script doing this as we speak) the suggestions are going to be a
little weak.

The book suggestions are faded unless you mouse over them - if you click on
them, you will be able to see a description of the book (as provided by
Amazon.) I'll experiment with different design elements to see how I could
make this more intuitive. Any suggestions?

~~~
nowarninglabel
Great to see a response. Regardless of your previous bot, seems like you have
a good application now and it is worth getting off the ground. I will try it
again in a couple weeks once your Corpus is rebuilt.

As far as the design, I would suggest the book icons come through in full
color, and when you mouse over you could highlight them, or even better
provide a short summary (just like how Netflix provides mouse over summaries
of movie suggestions).

~~~
hoop
Thanks for the feedback! I've taken your advice and changed the look/highlight
effect of the book icons. Check it out again and see what you think

<http://www.charleshooper.net/twitter/>

~~~
nowarninglabel
Looks much better now =) Only other suggestion I would give is to improve the
UI on that landing page. I'll be interested to see how this turns out for you.
Cheers.

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mildweed
$400.

Just go ahead and release the code. It didn't make you that much money.

~~~
hoop
Hah, nice try :-)

