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Could someone fill me in on the business model of these click farms? How do they profit from clicking other people's ads?

I'm sure it will be perfectly obvious in hindsight.

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They will typically set up several generic websites with ads, and set their click farm loose to represent fake traffic while clicking on ads for X% of impressions. You could also be a mercenary and drive traffic to other website operators who want traffic/rev, or even dilute quality/waste spend on competitor ad campaigns.

Since these click farms are typically just infected computers, they can likely setup other tasks to monetize: DDoS, email, BTC mining, etc...

they also own some of the sites on which ads are clicked

I don't believe that Facebook and Google are clicking their own ads

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