The spam is gibberish. Why do advertisers pay for it?

[BGL]

Looking at the latest spam on XenForo (same wacky thing about Coach bags), it is gibberish. Why would the advertisers be paying the spammers to post it?

On the flip side, if Coach is actually paying spammers for their ads, is there a way to establish as payment path and collect damages?

 

[Jaxel]

Because spam is CHEAP... it really doesn't cost anything to spam... and if only 1 out of 1000 attempts is successful, that more than pays for the cost.

 

[Chris D]

I think part of it too is the belief that the little URLs they place on some of the keywords will boost their page rank.

Of course, they do not realise that normal member URLs have the nofollow attribute, therefore their effort of posting all those lovely keywords pointing to their lovely sites is pretty pointless.

 

[BGL]

Because spam is CHEAP... it really doesn't cost anything to spam... and if only 1 out of 1000 attempts is successful, that more than pays for the cost.

Success being measured by someone using a link in the spam to access the advertisers website?

But even if doing the spam is cheap, setting up a spam server, running the software, monitoring the success rate, the accounting and overhead every business has, why is it gibberish with some links in it? Why not something more likely to get a hit. In the Coach spam on XenForo, why not a good ad more likely to get a hit vs. the gibberish. Cost of pasting a good ad vs. pasting gibberish is the same.

And don't the links in the spam must have some identifier for the spammer to get paid for the hits his spam creates?

Which gets to the money trail back to the advertiser paying for the spam? Spammer needs some ID in the spam to get paid for it's success so the spammer is ID'd to his bank account. Advertiser is tracking the hits and the spam source for the hits and paying into the spammer's account. No different than tracking down drug dealers and terrorists via the money the trail.

 

[ShadyX]

People pay per backlink, If somebody pays for an xrumer blast they will pay for like 10,000 backlinks or w/e. I doesn't matter about the quality as these things usually link to pages that link to pages that link to their site.

 

[craigiri]

Right, it pays between 5 and 15 cents per post or backlink. Often the people doing it (humans) are being paid by someone else - the aggregator.

Some of them may not do any good - in fact, as google and bing get smarter they may do harm. But as long as someone is gonna pay, someone is gonna post links!

 

[erich37]

well, Symantec would be bancrupt if there would be no viruses out there....

 

[Gene Steinberg]

Yeah, almost good for a conspiracy theory.

 

[BGL]

People pay per backlink, If somebody pays for an xrumer blast they will pay for like 10,000 backlinks or w/e. I doesn't matter about the quality as these things usually link to pages that link to pages that link to their site.

So embedded in the HTML of the spam is a link/ID of the spammer?

 

[ShadyX]

In the post, yeah there is a link back to the person who is spamming or the person who has paid to spam. But, sometimes to make sure this won't hurt their search engine rankings they will build links on other websites in a safer way then blast 10k spam posts back to where they built their links. Then no spam is linking to their website.

 

[Deepmartini]

Yeah, almost good for a conspiracy theory.

No, not conspiracy theories. I blame it on angry humans.