Facebook Spam Pages are a $200 Million Business


Facebook Spam Pages businessFor a blogger or an online business holder, what values the most is the organic traffic which really can be a difficult task for many of the newbies. Apart from the search engines, what really brings traffic to your blog is your social media popularity. The better you publicize your ideas and your posts on your Facebook Fan page or the more attractively you share your content on Google Plus, the better are the chances that you can enjoy a significant positive change in the rate of traffic generated.

According to the latest report been produced by the analysts, Facebook Spam Pages are bringing about $200 Million business to the spammers through Facebook, which is obviously not an exciting news for the Facebook, itself.

Business generated by Fan pages

What you also might have encountered on different Facebook Fanpages is the truth that the administrators actually share the post links to earn bait links by directing the traffic of their social media page to their blog. This is been done in such a way that the audience hardly gets to know that it is been spammed. As per the reports been revealed, a single post that contains a spam link is worth from $13 to $58, depending on how many likes the Facebook page has, according to researchers. Adding more to this, independent researchers found 30,000 Facebook Pages advertised on underground spam forums. Then they analyzed the Pages, looking for posts that contained keywords like “click here,” “free,” “wow,” or “join,” followed by shortened links.

Think of a fan page having a huge number of followers who like the funny jokes, informative facts, etc. shared by the administrators and often go to the link mentioned in the post to know more. This is when they are being spammed. It was recently that Andrea Stroppa, Carlo De Micheli, and Danny Di Stefano, the Italian researchers found out that out of 700,000 posts, 37,000 were spams which directed the viewers on Fake news, porn sites and other self-marketed websites.

A group of six researchers also stated:

Facebook Pages with less than 30,000 likes, spam posts can be sold for as much as $20 and as low as $8. For pages with more than 100,000 Likes, posts can cost as much as $100 dollars, and in some instances, for pages with millions of fans, the price is more than $200.

Facebook’s future at risk

It is important to understand that Facebook is merely a business platform now where the advertisers pay Facebook for marketing their products and services. According to the Facebook’s pages terms of service, a third party advertisement on pages is prohibited and by promoting content or a post through posting on Facebook Fan page, the administrator is violating the agreement.

It is highly expected that if the spamming continued this way, Facebook’s business will suffer as people would hardly pay the team for advertising and would continue with this easy and cheap way of marketing and also the local audience would likely leave the platform due to the fact of being spammed.

The research team had a word with one of the earning spammer via Skype and he said:

“Facebook doesn’t ban us simply because we generate the content on Facebook itself. Every day I materialize funny and interesting content full of phrases and so forth that is shared and liked by thousands of users,” he or she reportedly said, according to the researchers. “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 every day? You see? The answer is simple. Facebook doesn’t have a couple of 100 Euro servers like the ones we have, and can monitor in real time. Facebook could fight these if it wanted,”

Facebook is however, is working on its control.

Facebook’s future strategy

The researchers have presented their reports to Facebook which were replied by the following statement:

“Protecting the people who use Facebook from spam is a top priority for us. We have developed a number of systems to identify spam and stop it from spreading, and we have mechanisms in place to quickly shut down Pages, accounts, and applications that are found to be in violation of our terms of service. We also offer tools for people to report Pages and posts that might be spam. We will continue to improve our spam-fighting systems so we can to ensure that the overall level of spam on Facebook remains low.”

Spreading spamming anyway is undoubtedly a crime but more than that, it is an unethical way of making money. If you are marketing your posts this way, then it is highly recommended to stop doing so and try some other genuine and proud ways to make money online.

Best Wishes,

About Nida Zaidi

Nida Zaidi loves exploring new ways to Make Money Online. She has always enjoyed making a living out of affiliate sales and through content writing. She is a Gold star SEM contributor and a co-author.

View all posts by Nida →

Speak Your Mind