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The Monday Morning Memo

“Workers are paid, on average, one US dollar for a thousand [clicks.]”
– WIKIPEDIA, from their
“Click Farms” page.

“The paid-to-click (PTC) industry paid out around $13.2 million to remote workers to click ads for profit in 2020 (Campaign/CHEQ research)”

LET’S DO SOME MATH:
$13.2 million in payroll at 100 clicks/dollar = 13.2 Billion clicks
13.2 Billion clicks at a $5/click average = $66 Billion/yr. cost to advertisers
This number is pretty close to the number reported by CHEQ.ai
“Ad fraud is estimated to have cost marketers $61 billion in 2022″
“The cost of ad fraud is forecast to grow to $100 billion by 2025 (Statista)”

“Although click farm services violate many social media user policies, there are no government regulations that render them illegal.” – WIKIPEDIA

“Click farms are usually located in developing countries, such as China, India, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Egypt, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Bangladesh.” – WIKIPEDIA

“In Thailand in June 2017, a click farm was discovered with hundreds of mobile phones and several hundred thousand SIM cards.” – WIKIPEDIA

“As well as inflating engagement on social media, click farms are used for click fraud and ad fraud practices. This includes inflating the clicks and traffic on websites so that publishers can collect a fraudulent payout. This same traffic can also be hired to damage the paid ad campaigns of business rivals, known as competitor click fraud.” – WIKIPEDIA

“Many click farms advertise openly on the internet, usually masquerading as genuine traffic sources.” – WIKIPEDIA

“In contrast to PPC fraud, where a competitor leverages the services of a botnet, or low-cost labour, to generate false clicks, in this case the objective is to adopt a “beggar thy neighbour” policy against competitors by making their CTR rate as low as possible, thereby diminishing their position in search results.” – WIKIPEDIA

“Bad actors will therefore generate false clicks on organic search results that they wish to promote, while avoiding search results they wish to demote. This technique can effectively create a cartel of business services controlled by the same bad actor, or be used to promote a certain political opinion etc. The scale of this issue is unknown but is certainly evident to many website developers who pay close attention to the statistics in webmaster tools.” – WIKIPEDIA

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