Médias sociaux

Click Farms (les fermes de clics) ou comment se faire fourrer heureux

Il y a quelques années apparut les « gold farms », qui était ces anciennes usines où s’entassaient des milliers d’internautes sous-payés, qui jouaient du matin au soir au jeu World of Warcraft afin d’améliorer les performances d’avatars pour les revendre ensuite à prix fort. (sur Wikipedia)

Gold farming is playing a massively multiplayer online game to acquire in-game currency that other players purchase in exchange for real-world money. People in China and in other developing nations have held full-time employment as gold farmers.

While most game operators expressly ban the practice of selling in-game currency for real-world cash,[1] gold farming is lucrative because it takes advantage of economic inequality and the fact that much time is needed to earn in-game currency. Rich, developed country players, wishing to save many hours of playing time, may be willing to pay substantial sums to the developing country gold farmers.

De ces premières incursions dans l’univers des Sweatshop du web sont nées les Click Farms (ou fermes de clic) qui servent à augmenter artificiellement le nombre de like sur une page Facebook, d’abonnés sur Twitter, de view sur YouTube, d’écoute sur SoundCloud ou de clics sur les pubs des compétiteurs. Je me souvient d’ailleurs d,une firme de référencement et de marketing internet de Montréal (qui a été vendu récemment) qui obligeait ses employés à se créer de nombreux profils médias sociaux et à cliquer et à Digg (er) les contenus de leurs clients afin de booster artificiellement (le temps de recevoir le chèque) le positionnement naturel de ceux-ci. Ce n’est donc pas un phénomène si nouveau sauf que maintenant, étant donné la mondialisation et la facilité d’accès du « cheap labour », ces tactiques se font maintenant à très grande échelle, pour des coûts ridicules. Dans un article de AP (sur Yahoo) on peut lire :

BuyPlusFollowers sells 250 Google+ shares for $12.95. InstagramEngine sells 1,000 followers for $12. AuthenticHits sells 1,000 SoundCloud plays for $9.

L’une de ces entreprises de faux clics, ClickMonkeys, dits même sur son site

« Click Monkeys!!™ is a Ukrainian company and is not subject to United States law. All content copyright Click Monkeys!! »

Click Monkeys!!™ employs a state of the art line of site net access system.

We own a light house near San Jose with the equivalent of five T-3 lines worth of bandwidth running to it. The light house is equipped with two dozen microwave transmitters that are pointed at the H.M.S. Click Monkey. The transmitters are kept on target using a GPS system that is centered exactly on the on board transmitter.Even if the Click Monkey were to drift by 3 miles from her stationary position in the roughest weather, our monkeys can still keep clicking on your site!

Over 20,000 Click Monkeys!!™ live and work aboard our click farm. They work in shifts of 5,000 24 hours aday, 7 daysa week, 365 days a year!! Each monkey is able to access 12 pages per minute which gives us incredible traffic potential, just look at this math:

1 monkey x 1 hour = 720 page views/clicks

1 monkey x 1 day = 17,280 page views/clicks

5,000 monkeys x 1 day 86,400,000 page views/clicks!!!!

Each monkey has 3 computers going at once, and every computer in our farm is set to cycle through accounts on dozens of different IP addresses. Our traffic never looks like a bot because it isn’t! We guarantee thousands of different IP address generating page views and clicking on your banners!

There’s NO WAY for ad reps like DoubleClick or Googe to tell the difference between us and regular users!!

Pourquoi des gens paient-ils pour ce genre d’arnaque?

Par méconnaissance, par vanité sans doute un peu, mais surtout pour le fric. Dans le WashingtonPost :

It’s just a reminder that Web traffic is a valuable commodity, both for its ability to drive advertising revenue and its value in demonstrating popularity. In the absence of organic appeal, it can be generated manually, with the most menial kind of labor — and it makes sense that middlemen would source it from Bangladesh, which still has the lowest labor costs in the world.
Could click farming ever become a sector on the scale of simple textiles, which have gravitated to countries that can produce them the cheapest? Probably not, given the ferocity with which social media companies are fighting the trend — fake likes and followers are a huge business risk, and a cottage industry of auditors has cropped up to sniff them out. For now, though, it appears it’s become the most basic form of piecework in the global economy: One electronic impulse after another.

Et sur Yahoo

Tony Harris, who does social media marketing for major Hollywood movie firms, said he would love to be able to give his clients massive numbers of Twitter followers and Facebook fans, but buying them from random strangers is not very effective or ethical.
« The illusion of a massive following is often just that, »

Entretemps, vous pouvez aussi, pour beaucoup plus cher, vous faire des concours bidon sur Facebook et aller aussi vous chercher des likes. À moins que l’agence qui vous fait ces concours, sous-contracte déjà ces Click farms sans vous le dire 🙂

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