But what I'm struggling to understand is where is the money coming from to run those bots?
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?
> But what I'm struggling to understand is where is the money coming from to run those bots?
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.
It would but the fact it goes out and does it to other sites is weird. Why would someone else fraudulently click my ads? As an attack, I understand that, I've had that done to me. Just randomly seems odd. Maybe I'm just not creative enough to think of bad things to do with this. :D
for ad networks and social media platforms that provide monetization the click fraud is direct.
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.
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?