
Facebook Click Fraud 101 - davidw
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/06/26/facebook-click-fraud-101/
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pj
Awesome. There are so many lies being exposed in this article.

For one, _One advertiser told me how he paid $200 to an Indian operation for
2,000 Facebook accounts._ That means FaceBook's account numbers _must_ be
highly inflated. Their growth is inflated.

For two: _In our original post we quoted one advertiser who at least wanted to
see the traffic from the spam bots_ Why would someone want to see traffic from
a bot? That means even the advertisers are participating in some sort of lie.
The bots will never purchase anything, they only increase traffic numbers,
which are then used to lie to someone else. It's a _lie pyramid_.

It seems simple to alleviate some of the frauded advertisers' concerns by
simply following the redirect to the ultimate destination. Any online
advertising is so gameable that the value of these ads is vastly overstated.

This kind of fraud will get more sophisticated on both sides of the equation.
The advertisers will have to monitor more carefully. The fraudsters will hide
themselves better. Robots to do the fraud are extremely cheap.

ROI on ads will continue to decline. Fraud will continue to increase. All
these rules are designed by people, so people can get around them. I'm
reminded of the confessions of the poker bot maker from a few days ago.

~~~
DarkShikari
_For one, One advertiser told me how he paid $200 to an Indian operation for
2,000 Facebook accounts. That means FaceBook's account numbers must be highly
inflated. Their growth is inflated._

Facebook only counts active accounts (used in the past month), not total
accounts registered.

This means the stated number of accounts is not

(Number of real accounts + Number of spam accounts)

but is actually

(Number of real accounts + Number of currently used spam accounts)

I suspect the two expressions above are _very_ different from each other.

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mcantor
It seems like Facebook should really be able to suss out the automated
accounts based on a pretty broad analysis of usage data. If there are accounts
floating around out there which have only 3 seconds of activity per 24-hour
period, with no friends, no wall posts, and no applications added, in which
they do nothing but click on each ad 6 times, that's pretty suspicious. I feel
like it would be pretty tough to fake the usage profile of a regular Facebook
user.

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JeremyStein
"Often the fraudsters have their art down to a science and their software
clicks ads so fast and moves on to the next one that it doesn’t even hang
around long enough for the underlying URL to resolve."

I thought that was pretty funny. I suppose the author imagines a computer
program that clicks on links in a browser.

