Facebook Spammers earn $200m per year

If you’ve ever wondered how anyone could benefit from posting those spammy links that end up clogging up your Facebook news feed, prepare to be shocked. It turns out that people posting links to Facebook fan pages to third-party scam sites may be bringing in as much as US$200-million a year.That’s according to calculations by a group of Italian researchers who, according to The Guardian, investigated hundreds of thousands of posts on the world’s largest social network.

Andrea Stroppa and Carlo De Micheli, the leaders of the group, analysed pages across the network, and identified spam through the use of phrases such as "Hey click here for a free iPhone" followed by links to sites outside the network.They also discovered sites where spammers offer to set up fake fan pages in order to tempt Facebook users to click on links.
The postings breach Facebook's terms of service, which says that "third-party advertisements on [fan] Pages are prohibited without our prior permission."But trying to catch and get rid of the spammers is a growing problem for Facebook. The revenue that the spammers - and those running the sites linked to - do not form part of Facebook's revenue, but instead piggyback on the success of the social network, which now has more than a billion users worldwide.

The URLs to the outside sites have their destination hidden by using legitimate link-shortening services such as Tinyurl.com or bit.ly. That also makes it possible for researchers to track the ultimate destination - and figure out how many people click on the link.

Interestingly, they seem to think they’re doing Facebook a favour by posting the content they do:
“Facebook doesn’t ban us, simply because we generate the content on Facebook itself. Everyday I materialize funny, and interesting content full of phrases and so forth that is shared and liked by thousands of users. Without the fan pages Facebook would be an empty place. Tell me how many links do you see shared by your friends on your timeline everyday? You see – the answer is simple.”

Stroppa and De Micheli reckon it’s purely about financial self-interest though: “For people involved in this business the sole reason to continue is for the profit. We even found somebody who was selling a page dedicated to the memory of the victims of the Boston terrorist attack for US$1 000.”
A business that lucrative will, of course, become increasingly organised. The researchers, for instance, uncovered a network of over 30 000 pages dedicated to Facebook spam.

“Third parties pay spammers to post their links on Facebook pages, to reach the largest amount of users possible,” said De Micheli. For the financial model to work, the third parties must be accruing benefits even greater than they are paying the spammers – though it is impossible to know what their rate of return might be.
“We notice that it is rather common for the landing page [from a link] to be a product on an e-commerce site made to monetise quickly rather than to generate traffic on a home page,” De Micheli said. “Links to YouTube can be used to generate views, and so money – view generation on YouTube is a fast-growing market.” YouTube offers revenue-sharing arrangements with a number of users.