Comment by xSwag | Hacker News Reader

Comment by xSwag | Hacker News Reader

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>I still do not understand how it makes them money

When I saw this post the page had 404d. However, the page was still active in the Google cache[1]

It is not just Github being targeted, a lot of other large websites with user generated content are also being spammed with this content[2][3]

The spammers are linking the content to blogspot blogs so that they can: 1. hide the referrer from their affiliate program (to prevent getting banned for spamming) 2. to utilize the temp increase in search engine rankings 3. save money on domains for one-off usage

Since the "live stream" is just a one-off game that will only be popular/trending for 1-3 days in which period the spammers will use a lot of macro scripts/bots to spam these websites. Believe it or not, even a "nofollow" link can give you an advantage in search rankings. They spam them to death in the "popular period" and then bank money from the affiliate program[4]

[1]http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttps... [2]http://shine.yahoo.com/author-blog-posts/watch-38-enjoy-flor... [3]http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Awww.f... [4]http://www.officialtvstream.com.es/passport/signup.php?price...

The spammers are linking the content to blogspot blogs so that they can: 1. hide the referrer from their affiliate program (to prevent getting banned for spamming) 2. to utilize the temp increase in search engine rankings 3. save money on domains for one-off usage

Actually, in most cases, these reasons have little to do with it. For the most part, the pages are created on public sites because the links are spammed on social networks, and those networks quickly block postings with the same links over and over again. So, if you can create hundreds of different URLs with the same landing page, you can have hundreds of times the spam posts go through and not be blocked. Most of these guys don't bother with private domains because social networks will quickly issue a blanket block to all posts containing links to untrusted domains that have been reported to them for spam, but they will never issue a blanket block for a site like Github or Facebook. So the links last longer.

As to the specifics:

1) 1. hide the referrer from their affiliate program (to prevent getting banned for spamming). There are much easier and reliable ways to not only hide, but entirely change, the referer. See http://www.contentgeneration.org/cpa-redirector-2/

2)to utilize the temp increase in search engine rankings These sites aren't meant for that. Whether they link from the landing page straight to the affiliate link, or they go to a lander that is used to change the referer, they don't care about the search rankings of the links.

They spam them to death in the "popular period" and then bank money from the affiliate program

If you had to speculate: How much money?

(I know, it all depends, etc. But I was just hoping to get a rough idea of the order of magnitude here.)

I make a hundred bucks a month from amazon affiliate clicks, and I'm lazy.

Full disclosure: I frequent private "blackhat" forums and although I do not participate in these activities, I blog about them anonymously. Furthermore, I know a few people (online) who do stuff similar to this with CPA content lockers, so I'll try and give you an educated guess. In general the average conversion rate in the TV show/live content is around 0.5-3% depending on the quality of traffic.

Now, as you can see from Google Trends[1] some of these get very popular and trend once pretty much every year. In the second comparison, I've compared the search terms with a term I know is definitely popular to get relative popularity of the terms [2]. Comparing these two terms I can get an idea of the amount of traffic these website would get in the time period. I would estimate that the "big spammers" would easily get around 250k-500k uniques from multiple sources (spamming, mass advertising, social media, botnets etc).

Assuming they get paid $2 every signup, and have a conversion rate of 1.5% with 300k uniques, it would bank them around $9k, of course I'm only talking about the big guys here who have done this for a long time.

In general, I would say that the following is correct:

Upper quartile average: $1-3k per day for a few days

Lower quartile average: $50-60 per day for a few days

Quick edit: It should also be noted that for these live games over 95% of the traffic will be from the USA hence the large profits.

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[1]http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=Iowa%20vs%20Michigan%...

[2]http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=Iowa%20vs%20Michigan%...

Since when was putting the selfish desires of a for-profit company ahead of your own well-being virtuous?

This behavior is inherent to human nature, and presumably to everyone here who calls themselves a hacker. That Google doesn't "like" what I do has no moral or legal weight. The same goes for sites that accept user-generated content.

Obviously not everybody who's a spammer is good at it or a true hacker, but I would venture a guess that most hackers are blackhat if they do SEO, simply because they see this as a system that can be exploited with controlled heuristic testing as apposed to some superfluous tools and a whack community a la seoMoz.org

And it's not a zero-sum game. Google is forced to improve their natural language processing capabilities, their ability to execute more computationally expensive processing on massive amounts of content, so on and so forth, to try and keep up and provide a legitimate product.

So back to the spamming; Any site that allows you to put a link on it is a target for seo, of course. Maximizing c-class IP diversity among links is important. But more importantly, these pages are usually Tier-1 to Tier-2 in link schemes as it's effective to point the low level forum spam at user-content generated sites with strong domain authority and funnel the juice to your primary site. They're basically just buffers.

How long does it last? Varies greatly on how you're promoting it, the niche its in, etc. It doesn't always have to be "pump and dump" - I have multiple blogs over a year old that are alive and producing $1,200-$2,000 month each with almost no effort. When you can create just one of those blogs with about 10 hours worth of work (in total), there's obviously money to be made. And if you can write all of your own software to automate it, you can pretty much just "print money."

Some of my friends make over $200,000 per month with spamming.

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