Inside Social Media's Fake Fan Industry 63
jfruh writes "It's an open secret that many high-profile users of social media networks pay to pad their fan counts. But what you do you get for your money? One blogger decided to shell out some cash to find out. Instead of the real human fans he was promised, he found himself followed by a motley collection of obvious fakes created by non-English speakers and accounts that seem to mainly exist to spam porn links."
The real problem... (Score:5, Insightful)
The actual problem here is the value that is placed on having a high number of followers, likes or whatever. Back in the MySpace days this was simply a bunch of teenagers who wanted to claim some vague kudos through having more "friends" than others, but these days the marketing industry has latched on to it and people/companies are placing a real financial value on it. This is a problem - it's a bubble in the making, and when it pops there are going to be some pretty bitter recriminations and a lot of money lost.
So if you want to collect lots of followers, fine, it's up to you. But if you believe there's any financial value in it then I've got some tulips you may be interested in purchasing as an investment...
Pot, kettle... (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm bemused that the story about people padding their fan list is broken up into four separate screen pages, with only 5 paragraphs on the first page (I didn't bother to go any further), but the story itself was prefaced with an ad, had 8 full-fledged ad blocks on the main page, plus many more blocks with links to other stories and the various "Like me on X" buttons.
Re:The real problem... (Score:5, Insightful)
So marketers are about as intelligent as a Myspace-using teenager.
Sounds about right.
More to it than that (Score:5, Insightful)
On Facebook, high profile users not only pay to get more followers, but once they do, they must pay again to actually communicate with them. Unless you pay, FB only lets postings go to a few hundred followers. If you want more people to see your post, you have to pay a fee to "promote" your post. If you have 1 million followers, it can cost close to $1k per posting.
During the dotcom bubble, companies were ridiculed for business plans that were based entirely on "selling eyeballs". FB has taken the same business concept to next level. I'd like to see an independent audit of Facebook's DAU metric and their 1 billion MAU claim. The company asserts that only about 8% of user profiles are fake and no analysts challenge that statistic. Clearly, it is not in Facebook's interest to weed out fake accounts; on the contrary, their revenue depends on them.