Spamming on facebook is maybe more lucrative than we thought. According to a research done by Italian researches facebook spammers are making around $200m a year.
The business model behind facebook spamming is that you have a fan page and you are posting links to third party scam sites. The results of the study were presented in the guardian. The most interesting are the numbers concerning value of the links posted in the fan pages. If the post is published in the fan pages with 30k fans link is able to earn on average 13 dollars. In the fan page with 100k fans it is on average 58 dollars. To hide where the links are pointing, spammers are using the service bit.ly for shortening the links.
Spam facebook page has to be build at first. When they have sufficient number of fans they start to post links that are making them money. You can make money for instance by sending your fans to website with malware or by bringing traffic to websites with ads. The third option is to simply get paid by publishing the links.
The value of the links are derived from the third option. That means researches were closely following the forum where you can buy or sell these links.
Interesting thing about this is that google is also profiting from this strategy. Spammers are sending trafiic to websites with google ads. If the people click to those ads google is making money too.
If you have any experieces with that or you are a facebook fan page owner please share you stories 🙂
Michal
Hi Michal,
Interesting story, I like how people are being very innovative in making money on the world wide web. I rarely like a Facebook page because these things happen, most of the time the links they provide you with are completely irrelevant.
But sometimes a link appears on Twitter from a rather reliable follower. I clicked it once. Spam.
I don’t understand why companies or organizations waste money on these Facebook pages while there are so many great ways in being visible on social media. If you know any of those companies, please send them to me and I’ll provide them with an extraordinary social media strategy;)
On the other hand, 200 million. That’s a lot. I’m just sitting here typing a blog post while I could also be copy pasting some spamlinks to a Facebook fan page and make some millions. Where did I made the wrong choice?
A last more seriously note: I think this way of placing ads is not sustainable for the Facebook page nor for the company which the spam leads to.