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Comment by yangez | Hacker News Reader

This problem isn't confined to Facebook alone. A while back we were getting ridiculous CPAs on Google Adwords of under 50c, but quickly realized that literally none of these were converting into paying customers. Notably, we were targeting English-speaking countries only, so I don't know why we were getting hits from India and Egypt and stuff.

After targeting US and Canada only, CPAs skyrocketed but each signup actually became worth something.

I'm confused. Who benefits from these click / like bots that seem to plague every advertising platform, besides the platform itself?

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Did you have AdWords ads running on the "Content Network" (i.e. other random sites)? I was getting a bunch of click fraud on some Google ads a while back. Based on the referrers, it was pretty clearly someone who set up a bunch of sites and then was generating a ton of automated traffic to click on their ads and generate money. The bots even went so far as to fill out the contact form on our landing page once getting there (I guess to trick Google's conversion tracking script?).

The worst part is I submitted some of this data to Google and they basically said, don't worry we've already detected all the click fraud and filtered it out so you never were charged for it. Uh, ok. No way to prove or disprove that. But if you identified these bozos as fraudsters, why do they still have AdWords accounts weeks later?

"we were targeting English-speaking countries only, so I don't know why we were getting hits from India and Egypt and stuff"

Seriously? Seriously?

I mean... no, never mind. "Confused" doesn't even begin to describe it. Given that the US doesn't have an official language, India is more of an English speaking country than the US is.

> "Confused" doesn't even begin to describe it.

Relax, no need for that. Obviously India is an English-speaking country, but when we targeted "English" speakers we expected a higher percentage of our traffic to come from Western sources like the US and Canada, instead of 95%+ from click farms in India. We found that wasn't the case, so we switched to country-specific targeting. Thanks for educating me, though.

Sorry, it's a bit of a knee-jerk reaction caused by the number of American sites that treat non-US visitors like it's a nuisance they even dare to visit, as if an English language .com site is an "Americans-only" sign.

(This is especially insulting if the site in question represents a company/brand that actually operates internationally.)

Also, English speakers are not limited to countries with English as an (un)official language. Just an example, LinkedIn had 3 million Dutch users before they introduced a Dutch language interface. I don't know what business you're in, but that's a lot of creditcards...

Possibly competitors of the advertiser [who can't afford PPC]?

Another thought: An advertiser could use a bot to click on ads for keywords they are targeting. If they could exhaust their competitors daily budget they could potentially get higher placement for less CPC [later in the day]. I'm thinking of Adwords here.

This. I think it's an attempt to keep the PPC prices for certain keywords down. Exhaust the budgets of competitors.

Maybe they are voting bots that keep liking random junk to not look suspicious when they all together like something the botnet owner decides that they all shall like.

It would look a bit weird if thousands of users always liked exactly the same thing and nothing else.

That makes sense, it would be nice if someone tested this theory to see if there were commonalities in which ads this apparent botnet liked.

... but then you'd assume that'd be something Facebook ran automated checks for.

Potential benefactors:

1. Facebook - obviously they benefit from higher CPMs in any country. I seriously doubt they would create fake profiles on their own system though (that would be fraud).

2. Like resellers/advertisers - A client comes to you and says they want tons of likes. While there are a lot of ways to work around this system, one obvious way is to generate fake profiles in countries where the CPMs are low, then target ads at your own bot army. You can sell the likes, generate the likes yourself, and profit. Otherwise you're waiting for quality people to like your page which as this article illustrates, is extremely costly. The bottom line: pay for cheap likes, receive cheap likes.

I should add that these malevolent actors in the system are beneficial in the short-term for Facebook (CPMs rise) but bad in the long-term. As genuine advertisers see their effective CPMs rise, the ROI decreases. This forces benevolent actors out...

> Who benefits from these click

The guys you pay, most obviously.

Follow the money, you'll get to the source.

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