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Created on August 10, 2013 at 19:27
Bangladesh: Global centre of online fakery
Joseph Allchin Technology
Bangladesh: Global centre of online fakery | Dhaka Tribune
Photo- Wikimedia
A British documentary for Channel 4 has found a thriving industry of ‘click farms,’ where people end-lessly click on social media pages to make brands appear more popular.
The documentary team met with business people and filmed operations undercover. For as little as $15
an entrepreneur named Russel could give you 1,000 unique likes on a
Facebook fan page, in “three or four hours.”
People working from home, endlessly creating new fake Facebook profiles and clicking like over and over do much of this work. However some of the operations are based in offices in which ‘clickers’ do shifts, so that clicking occurs 24 hours a day.
Amongst the brands using the click farms was an online gambling site called Monopoly Plus, which was licensed from the popular board game owned by Hasbro. Whilst a UK tourist board for a national park called the Peak District had also utilised a Bangladeshi ‘click farm,’ Creative IT, owned by Ali Asgar who described himself as the “king of Facebook.”
Asgar started off clicking as a freelancer. Creative IT was hired by a small UK marketing firm called SM4B, who specialise in advertising on social media.
The demand for such services stems from search engine optimisation (SEO) whereby the more popular a page is the higher up an online search it will appear. Whilst the growth of social media has meant that consumers increasingly look online for products or service they are after. If a page has thousands of ‘likes’ they are more likely to purchase from that site.
A site called ShareyT was amongst the market leaders. Here a stream of pages would appear and one has to watch a YouTube video for a given time in exchange for online tokens.
The tokens could then be exchanged for tiny amounts of cash. ShareyT’s owner claimed to have around
25,000 people clicking for him in Bangladesh alone. One of ShareyT’s links was for an advert for Coca Cola on YouTube.
The video boasted 6 million views. Clickers will only make around $30 in a few months of clicking ac-cording to its owner, Sharaf Al Nomani.
Online advertising is a growing sector as advertisers follow consumers away from traditional media. Moreover, the use of social media works well for advertisers. People are more likely to believe a re-view of a product if they don’t know it has been paid for.
Coupled with this, sluggish western economies have slashed marketing budgets, making cheap alterna-tives attractive.
Most of the brands featured denied any knowledge of the practice. Third parties, often-small market-ing companies in the west, hire companies such as Creative IT here.
Last updated on August 10, 2013 at 19:27
Bangladesh: Global centre of online fakery
Joseph Allchin Technology
Bangladesh: Global centre of online fakery | Dhaka Tribune
Photo- Wikimedia
A British documentary for Channel 4 has found a thriving industry of ‘click farms,’ where people end-lessly click on social media pages to make brands appear more popular.
The documentary team met with business people and filmed operations undercover. For as little as $15
an entrepreneur named Russel could give you 1,000 unique likes on a
Facebook fan page, in “three or four hours.”
People working from home, endlessly creating new fake Facebook profiles and clicking like over and over do much of this work. However some of the operations are based in offices in which ‘clickers’ do shifts, so that clicking occurs 24 hours a day.
Amongst the brands using the click farms was an online gambling site called Monopoly Plus, which was licensed from the popular board game owned by Hasbro. Whilst a UK tourist board for a national park called the Peak District had also utilised a Bangladeshi ‘click farm,’ Creative IT, owned by Ali Asgar who described himself as the “king of Facebook.”
Asgar started off clicking as a freelancer. Creative IT was hired by a small UK marketing firm called SM4B, who specialise in advertising on social media.
The demand for such services stems from search engine optimisation (SEO) whereby the more popular a page is the higher up an online search it will appear. Whilst the growth of social media has meant that consumers increasingly look online for products or service they are after. If a page has thousands of ‘likes’ they are more likely to purchase from that site.
A site called ShareyT was amongst the market leaders. Here a stream of pages would appear and one has to watch a YouTube video for a given time in exchange for online tokens.
The tokens could then be exchanged for tiny amounts of cash. ShareyT’s owner claimed to have around
25,000 people clicking for him in Bangladesh alone. One of ShareyT’s links was for an advert for Coca Cola on YouTube.
The video boasted 6 million views. Clickers will only make around $30 in a few months of clicking ac-cording to its owner, Sharaf Al Nomani.
Online advertising is a growing sector as advertisers follow consumers away from traditional media. Moreover, the use of social media works well for advertisers. People are more likely to believe a re-view of a product if they don’t know it has been paid for.
Coupled with this, sluggish western economies have slashed marketing budgets, making cheap alterna-tives attractive.
Most of the brands featured denied any knowledge of the practice. Third parties, often-small market-ing companies in the west, hire companies such as Creative IT here.
Last updated on August 10, 2013 at 19:27
