Click Fraud Blog
Entrecard Bans ClickBots/DropBots
June 28th, 2008
A number of months ago, I wrote an article about gaming Entrecard and asked if it was a type of click fraud.
The crux of this post was that people were creating click bots or drop bots to drop a virtual business card on other peoples blogs in exchange for credits, these credits could then be exchanged for advertising or even sold for hard cash.
I recently received an e-mail from the Entrecard team which backs up what I was thinking about at the time, it is now against the programs code of conduct to run these click bots.
It takes no leap of imagination to see that if people can make money easily by dropping virtual business cards then someone will write some code to “game” this procedure.
I’m resisting the temptation to say I told you so, but I guess Entrecard are feeling the pain due to lower quality clicks from their program. At the time they said these activities were okay.
The body of the email is shown below:
Greetings,
This message is to inform you that effective July 1, 2008, Entrecard will be purging from its system the accounts of all members currently operating “Quick Drop Pages”. We have assembled a massive list of all quick drop pages, and starting on the above mentioned date, we are going to go through the entire list and close the accounts of all the owners.
To avoid having your account with Entrecard permanently removed, you must take down your quick drop page before July 1. If we open a quick drop page with your widget on it, your account will be removed from Entrecard without warning.
What is a Quick Drop Page?
Here is an example:
http://entrecard.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2008/06/screenhunter_02-jun-26-1736.gif
Quick drop pages are single pages with your Entrecard widget, made to load quickly and display your widget and not much else. Many quick drop pages have just a widget, and maybe an ad or some other type of widget. If you have a quick drop page, you must take it down immediately.Why are Quick Drop Pages bad?
Quick drop pages devalue our network as a whole, by motivating members to drop on the same, quick loading pages, en masse to gain credits quickly and efficiently. Their traffic is going to these quick drop pages instead of being dispersed among quality blogs. It goes against the spirit of Entrecard, and is essentially a scheme to gain credits quickly.How will you find them?
Luckily for us, people running “quick drop”, or “powerdrop” pages have listed themselves all over the internet, and we’ve amassed a list that we believe includes every power drop page in existence. Additionally, members dropping on “quick drop pages” may start receiving stiff credit penalties for every drop they do on quick drop pages, as it is not a visit to a blog and thus an illegal drop.For more info see our blog:
http://entrecard.com/blog/?p=399
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Tags: Gaming EntreCard
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