Many many thanks, one thousand times thank you

It is strange how bot creators will go to such great lengths to create smart bots. Is it worth going that far just to spam? I can understand sending a spoof email once in a while or an email to spam, but to go as far as to create a bot to do so just seems way out of the ordinary.

It is strange how bot creators will go to such great lengths to create smart bots. Is it worth going that far just to spam? I can understand sending a spoof email once in a while or an email to spam, but to go as far as to create a bot to do so just seems way out of the ordinary.

Evidently it is. If can they get a conversion rate of a few decimal points of a percent, but saturate across millions of 'customers', it becomes worthwhile.

Yeah. Imagine you post 10,000 advertisements a day. Let's say 1000 users click those advertisements, and let's say 100 of those clicks each turns into $1 cash. That's 100 bucks for a days worth of spam.

Not saying that's how it actually is, but if you think how large sites make their money via ads, then it's not hard to imagine spamming ads could have a similar result.

Well first you have to buy what they advertize, which many probably don't, and then the sites probably only get a small percentage of the money you spent to buy the product, but it adds up the more of that product that people buy. Probably closer to how it works. So I guess you are saying that the bots just post ads which are considered spam.

I had some funny bots posting links in my yahoo IM before. They actually responded when I posted messages back but only with limited responses. At first I thought they were real people until I realized the responses were immediate and repetitive. I wouldn't click the link anyways because I suspect malware plus it looks like an odd link. I scan their ids with a yahoo invisible scanner service and they are always online.

Well first you have to buy what they advertize, which many probably don't, and then the sites probably only get a small percentage of the money you spent to buy the product, but it adds up the more of that product that people buy. Probably closer to how it works. So I guess you are saying that the bots just post ads which are considered spam.

Yes, it is indeed exactly the thing that Hunter and I just said, restated in a slightly different way.