Jan 2
Subvert and Profit
Now that’s a nice name for a website. Subvert and Profit shows the ugly face of the internet underground.
There are many online communities dedicated to exchange services for money, and there’s nothing wrong about that.
But it’s quite usual to find “job opportunities” to vote for certain items on digg.com or stumbleupon.com. There are also link exchanges, del.icio.us tagging and several other ways to bring traffic to websites.
Some are sleazier than others and most explore the inequities of social news algorithms. The idea is quite simple. Get a group of 100 people to vote for your story on digg and you’re on the front page, getting the much wanted traffic to your website.
Apparently Subvert and Profit is expanding to youtube, according to this Techcrunch post:
While they have not yet revealed how they plan on subverting and profiting from YouTube, we can take some guesses based on Dan Ackerman’s infamous guest post on the subject. Dan’s viral suggestions included email lists, comments, views, blog embeds, and ratings. I imagine S&P’s strategy will center around paying their users to boost each of these.
However, getting big on YouTube is significantly harder than Digg or StumbleUpon. Front page featured videos are chosen by YouTube itself and pushing a video up the ranks in terms of views requires tens of thousands, not hundreds of user actions. I can only imagine their plans include outright view fraud to make the video “go viral”.
Maybe Youtube is quite difficult to monetize, but I’d bet that quite soon we’ll start seeing twitter spam, if not from these guys from some other folks.
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It can’t be long until someone programs a botnet that will do that automatically, farming only the captchas to humans (via pr0n websites…). They can even create the fake online identities by clever usage of search engines, (to try) to defeat heuristic filtering.
Twitter spam is slowly cooking in the oven and should be ready soon. I’ve noticed a number of follows that lead to an account following thousands for months (in hopes they follow back) yet they have no posts. Usually their URL points to some sort of marketing site.
Another tactic I’m seeing which I believe is done by a bot, is to follow someone which will cause twitter to send a “Your being followed” email, then un-follow. Many people automatically follow those that are following them out of curtesty. These typically lead to accounts owned by those in the entertainment industry. Similar to the band-spam found on MySpace.
it’s not spam… it’s twitter!