How does the advertising money get to them to make it worth their while to run bots at such a scale?
I mean sure, I suspect that people in the advertisers are doing it, but surely thats massively risky. there must be a grey market for this kind of transaction?
I agree, I have a hard time understanding the motivation for this behavior. It's obviously happening, I just don't know how someone benefits from a bot pretending to browse the internet.
I was thinking about ad traffic from one of the meta/twitter/tiktok products and couldn't think what the motivation would be
there is also a massive industry of fake accounts and fake engagement for social media and SEO (google). bots are designed to create plausibly real engagement, which is used to trick ranking algorithms into boosting content. these bots have to be real enough to bypass platform detection. clicking through on ads is a way of incentivizing platforms not to shut them down and possibly improving the ranking results, working with the theory that platforms give stronger weight to engagement signals from clients that generate more revenue.