The new kings of YouTube botting
kernelmag.dailydot.com
kernelmag.dailydot.com
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.
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.
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.
Startup idea: Make a trusted, corruption free review site, with employed reviewers.
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.
It's simply cheapens everything about social media in general.