AdSense

AdSense

Google's Ad program: https://www.google.com/adsense/

Spammers like to use it on their spammy sites. Antispammers like to get their accounts suspended.

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Discussion

Am I understanding this correctly? To benefit from using AdSense the spammers are hoping that a user will not only follow their irrelevant links from the wiki / blog, but also follow more links (the google ads) from that page.

Can't be that many users who do that. I guess it depends on the type of spam, and the type of spamvertised website. The majority of spam I've seen is linking to weird link-farms which are not at all designed to be enticing to a humans. But I suppose they sometimes just slap in some google Ads on the off-chance. – Halz - 2005-09-06 11:21 UTC

Halz, the goal isn't to be enticing to humans per se, I believe the goal is to attract the Google search engine. The revenue stream works as follows:

1. the spammer uses linkspam on blogs and wikis to raise the spammy site's PR on Google for lucrative key words,
2. a human does a Google search for a keyword and clicks the search result to visit the spammy site hoping to find what he or she is look for,
3. upon arrival the human immediately recognizes the page as spam and perhaps flails around a bit looking for a way to escape the spammy page,
4. in the process of looking for a way to escape a small percentage of visitors click on the only reasonable looking links on the page (namely the AdSense links),
5. AdSense pays spammer for the click.

Even if the revenue stream is small, I suspect it isn't hard to earn more than the yearly domain registration, so if you've got a thousand such sites you probably can make more than a few bucks. – RichardP - 2005-08-08 09:20

I don't know about AdSense, but some ads at least used to also get pay for visitors just viewing the Ad. – Joe - 2005-09-06 20:11 UTC