Human Clickbots Swarm Parked Domains
Andrew at Traffick.com blogged about click arbitrage on parked domains. He wonders if advertisers are throwing their money away. My answer is hell yes! Click arbitrage involves buying clicks (through a Google Adwords campaign, for example) to bring traffic to your site (in this case a parked domain) then selling clicks from that traffic to other advertisers at a higher price.
Andrew questions whether it makes any sense for advertisers to pay MORE for the clicks than they would've paid using Adwords. After all, he reasons, the traffic to a parked domain page probably isn't all that great. That's a HUGE understatement.
Why? Because there's currently a huge amount of PTRE (paid to read email) traffic going to those parked domains. Hundreds of thousands of "human clickbots" reading an incentivized email, then clicking the special tracking link that takes them to the parked domain page. The PTRE member typically earns between 1/4 and 1 cent for clicking that tracking link and waiting for a timer (shown in a separate frame) to expire.
But it doesn't end there. The clickbots know that if they want to get more paid emails, they need to make it worthwhile to the person who's paying them. So they click an ad link. Or two. Or three. Maybe they just click a random link. Or maybe they try to guess which link will pay their benefactor the most. Or maybe they're clicking so many links in so many browser tabs that they don't really know what they're clicking.
With enough browser windows open, and a little practice, they can click dozens of links per minute. For hours. And since they get paid a small percentage of their downline's earnings as well, they use some of the money they make to recruit even more human clickbots.
I can only guess, but I suspect PTRE programs are sending millions of clickbot visits to parked domains every day. Presumably the useless human clickbot traffic can't be a huge percentage of the total, or else advertisers would bail. But it may be a way for the various tiers of ad server companies to bulk up the traffic numbers they can deliver. The problem for advertisers of course is that the vast majority of that traffic is absolutely useless.
Andrew questions whether it makes any sense for advertisers to pay MORE for the clicks than they would've paid using Adwords. After all, he reasons, the traffic to a parked domain page probably isn't all that great. That's a HUGE understatement.
Why? Because there's currently a huge amount of PTRE (paid to read email) traffic going to those parked domains. Hundreds of thousands of "human clickbots" reading an incentivized email, then clicking the special tracking link that takes them to the parked domain page. The PTRE member typically earns between 1/4 and 1 cent for clicking that tracking link and waiting for a timer (shown in a separate frame) to expire.
But it doesn't end there. The clickbots know that if they want to get more paid emails, they need to make it worthwhile to the person who's paying them. So they click an ad link. Or two. Or three. Maybe they just click a random link. Or maybe they try to guess which link will pay their benefactor the most. Or maybe they're clicking so many links in so many browser tabs that they don't really know what they're clicking.
With enough browser windows open, and a little practice, they can click dozens of links per minute. For hours. And since they get paid a small percentage of their downline's earnings as well, they use some of the money they make to recruit even more human clickbots.
I can only guess, but I suspect PTRE programs are sending millions of clickbot visits to parked domains every day. Presumably the useless human clickbot traffic can't be a huge percentage of the total, or else advertisers would bail. But it may be a way for the various tiers of ad server companies to bulk up the traffic numbers they can deliver. The problem for advertisers of course is that the vast majority of that traffic is absolutely useless.
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