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Comment by paulpauper | Hacker News Reader

But how does one go about getting traffic to such a sham site? In terms of SEO, hihg traffic keywords are very competitive, and advertising such as Google or Facebook is expensive. If one were to copy the template and puts ads on it, it's not like they would start making thousands of dollars a day.

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I worked in adtech detecting and blocking this stuff circa 2011. Back then it was common for sites like these to be used to launder impressions into higher-paying CPI categories. So you might have an arcade site (low CPI) include a hidden iframe for a fake beauty site.

It was honestly pretty easy to detect, but it seemed to me that the industry was just looking the other way because everyone in the industry was just trying to drive volume for their eventual IPO.

I think now the iframe stuff is harder to get away with, but botnets were a big source of traffic as well.

I used to think that people would really care about this but because only the advertisers are being defrauded everyone does tend to look the other way. I wouldn't shut up about ad fraud and how big a deal it was going to be years ago and I was just wrong because people in this sector just have a really high tolerance for crime and people are just looking the other way.

Google purchased Spyder.io and did nothing with it by the looks of it.

I was involved in the brand safety space (I built ML systems to detect things that are unsafe for the brand). My impression is that even brands aren't really _that_ interested in brand safety. I think they're more reactive than proactive on that end.

They aren't making money off human visitors, its largely click farms and botnets.

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