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Re:Company withdrawing from Facebook as analytics show 80% o... by cookiecaper on Tuesday July 31, 2012 @12:38AM (#4315737)
It's just as easy to invest in several fake profiles that act just like real users. Pay people to work from home maintaining fake accounts for you, posting stuff that seems real, interacting with your other fake accounts and celebrity/business pages, etc. Then, run bots with these accounts, click around on a subset of good links randomly, and throw in a reasonable ratio of ad clicks per account, then move on to the next shill account.

This definitely takes non-trivial effort, but it's also definitely doable if you have a serious interest in perpetrating click fraud. While Facebook hypothetically could fight this form of click fraud, it'd likely be difficult and the method would be fragile/easily circumvented. Like most things, PPC advertising can only function in a world primarily populated with positive actors.

Re:Company withdrawing from Facebook as analytics show 80% o... by simula67 on Tuesday July 31, 2012 @03:26AM (#4316114)
I am unsure if Facebook provides a service like AdSense to motivate this kind of behavior. It would be interesting if to see how they could fight this type of behavior though.

1. Make the split uneven. For example for every dollar advertiser pays, only 30 cents goes to the page owner who received the "Likes"

2. Lobby to make these kinds of activity illegal. They are after all spamming activities

3. These kinds of fake account farms will usually have very few connections to outside world. That is, accounts that do not obey the "Six Degrees of seperation" should be flagged for human review.

4. Once reviewed enlist law enforcement help to track down the owners of the all the accounts in these farms.

Painstaking work, but I guess the point is that advantage can lie with Facebook as opposed to the spammer in this game. I am not sure about the ethical implications though.

Maybe this is why Google wants to succeed badly in the social space : extra spam fighting abilities.

Re:Company withdrawing from Facebook as analytics show 80% o... by roel_v on Tuesday July 31, 2012 @03:32AM (#4316130)
You're basically saying 'there is a point where the line between actual user and paid click-frauder becomes blurry'. Which is true, but that point is way beyond what is profitable, which is enough - you 'only' need to make your system hard enough to beat to make it not worth the effort.
Re:Company withdrawing from Facebook as analytics show 80% o... by cookiecaper on Tuesday July 31, 2012 @03:38AM (#4316140)
Sure, I agree that your summary is correct. I don't really think the system I described is necessarily untenable, though. If you make 10k+/mo from ads I think it could be plenty profitable.
Re:Company withdrawing from Facebook as analytics show 80% o... by tantalor on Tuesday July 31, 2012 @12:22PM (#4318039)
Google seems to handle click fraud pretty well: http://www.google.com/intl/en_ALL/ads/adtrafficquality/index...

I couldn't find any resources on how Facebook handles this.

Re:Company withdrawing from Facebook as analytics show 80% o... by mkup on Tuesday July 31, 2012 @07:20AM (#4316645)
It's much easier to guess a weak password than create a fake profile. As for everything else, I totally agree with you.