This will hopefully be my last article about corruption in Silicon Valley for a while. My reason is because I do have a company to run, and I feel what I'm doing with these articles is our collective responsibility, and not something a single human should be embarking on. Besides, I've promised someone close to me to stop being angry, and writing articles such as these make me very, very, very angry - Because they remind me of all the criminal thieves and thugs in the world, profiting from other peoples' misery. However, I have to bring my argument full circle, and end where it started; Google!
Do no evil!
The above is Google's slogan. Whether or not it's a lie, I'll leave up to the reader of this article to find out for himself. However, facts are that Google is profiting from modern-day slavery, at a magnitude that's quite frankly incomprehensible and difficult to understand.
Click farms
A click farm is a company with sometimes thousands of employees, whos job it is to literally sit and click links all day long. They are typically operated out of South East Asia, in countries such as the Philipines, Thailand, Vietnam, or Bangladesh. You can read one article about the problem written by CNN below.
What CNN fails to mention of course, is that the by far largest of these scams are advertisement-based click farm scams, where Google is literally profiting tens of billions of dollars annually on such slavery.
These click farms used to put out ads in China for vacant positions. In their job ads they would write that employees could earn high salaries and live a comfortable life, by being willing to move to for instance the Philipines, and start working for the click farm. The click farm would of course not say anything about what type of work they were supposed to do, but only vaguely mention things such as "online marketing" or "technology sector".
As teenagers looking for a better life for themselves took the bait and flied out to countries hosting these click farms, they would often be physically detained by their employer, have their passports taken away from them - For then to be forced into slavery-like work conditions expecting to work 80+ hours per week, sometimes for almost no salary at all.
It is believed that hundreds of thousands of click farm employees are living under conditions such as the above today. The problem is so large that China has issued "travel warnings" for teenagers wanting to travel to other countries looking for work.
How the scam work
These click farms always use VPN systems. This allows their online browsing to be perceived as originating from another country, typically in the west, such as Canada, US, or Europe.
Then the click farm will create shallow one page websites, and apply for becoming "Google partners". Once they're partners of Google, they will get 70% of all ad revenue generated by clicks on the ads on their own website. Some click farms will have thousands of such one-page websites.
Then they will include a simple JavaScript file on this website, and have employees working under slavery-like conditions being forced to sit and click links on their websites all day.
Since a single click can sometimes result in 5 to 15 dollars in revenue due to the cost per click (CPC), this allows the click farm to make thousands of dollars per hour for each "employee" they are able to get their hands on.
Google will invoice the advertiser, keep 30% of the revenue, and send the rest to the click farm owners.
Google is refusing to fix this
Do me a favour, login to your Google Ads account and create a new ad campaign. Did you notice how Google is trying to make you use their "Display network"? If you turn it off, they'll even warn you that you have not thoroughly "optimised" your campaign, and that you can, quote; "Reach a wider audience by turning on the display network."
Google's wording is something about how you can reach a wider audience by allowing your ad to be shown on partners' websites, but today approximately 99% of these "partners" are basically criminal thieves and thugs, stealing your advertisement money, by forcing detained teenagers to work under slavery-like conditions while clicking your ads.
Financial estimates considers this to be a business model worth hundreds of billions of dollars annually, and Google could easily fix it, but they make so much money on it that they don't want to fix it. Fixing the issue only requires Google to by default turn off the "Display network", and stop telling advertisers that they need to turn it on to "optimise" their ads, and this alone would probably eliminate 98% of the problem.
Yes, behavioural psychologists and their research have shown us that the above would literally eliminate 98% of the problem
The reasons are because once confronted with a complex choice, our default behaviour is to not choose, but rather let the default value be as it is. So 98% of all advertisers not realising how the display network works, will simply let it be the way it was by default. Since it's on by default, this implies 98% of advertisers not understanding the feature will let it stay on.
For Google to claim they don't understand the above, is the equivalent of having your math tutor claiming not understanding basic multiplication! So it is obviously by design!
The end result becomes that some slavery-like click farm business in the Philipines steals most of your advertisement budget, while keeping thousands of slaves under inhumane working conditions, forced to do nothing but clicking your ad all day long.
Google is making billions of dollars on this annually!
Google also have access to website quality measurement systems, since these are at the core of their own search engines. Refusing websites that have zero or close to zero organic traffic from Google to display ads, would be a no-brainer for them.
There are literally half a dozen methods Google could implement to completely eliminate this problem, but they don't, because they make more money by stealing your money, and sending parts of it to slavery-operated click farms in South East Asia.
Since this is a really big problem for Chinese authorities, it is also a matter of national security - Because the CCP can easily use this in their propaganda to rally their citizens up against "the malicious forces in the US and Europe." So fixing the issue is not only about your advertisement budget and teenagers being sold into slavery, it is also a matter of national security!
China could declare war against the US using the above as an argument, and most people having deep knowledge about the problem, would easily be able to see how it would be a "just war" - Simply because of the magnitude of the problem ...
Why they need humans
Some people will wonder why the click farm is using human labour in the first place. Why not simply use bots? The answer is simple; CAPTCHA. Most websites have some sort of CAPTCHA implementation, which allows them to see if a click originates from a human being or a bot.
This allows the website to "see" bot traffic, which of course results in an unwillingness to pay for ads once they realise 99% of their clicks are originating from bots. So a human slave using a VPN is required to actually click the link, scroll some few inches, and wait for 5 seconds before they close their browser tab. This avoids detection from automated software created to eliminate the problem.
To make the scam work, the click farm requires thousands of human workers sitting in front of a computer all day, not doing anything but clicking on your ads, to steal your advertisement money.
Because these click farms are also using VPN systems, this makes you falsely believe your ads are being clicked on by people in North America or Europe, while your ads are actually being clicked on by slaves in the Philipines. If you create an ad for pancakes exclusively targeting your local neighbours in your tiny village with 5,000 people in the Missouri, there is a big risk that 90% of your clicks originates from South East Asia, creating the illusion of that it's people from your village actually clicking your ad.
Needless to say, but some Chinese teenager, working as a slave out of Thailand, is obviously not going to buy your pancakes. But you pay $2 to Google every time he clicks your ad!
While we're at it, Google also have lists of IP addresses belonging to these click farms, and could easily weed out traffic from such click farms, by simply comparing the IP address of the click towards their inhouse database of "registered click farm VPN IP addresses" - Completely eliminating the problem. But unfortunately ...
These click farms are "Google partners", and they make Google billions of dollars annually, so here we are ...
Do NOT pay Google
If you're paying for Google ads, not only do you run the risk of throwing your advertisement budget out the window, but you're also subsidising slavery in South East Asia, and creating justifications for world war 3. There is really only one fix for this problem, and it's very easy to understand ...
DO NOT PAY GOOGLE!!
It's the only language they understand, and the only way we can collectively fight it! Because even if they fix these problems, they've already clearly demonstrated that they're willing to do whatever it takes to earn some extra money, resulting in that they will probably find new means to rip you off - Regardless of how much suffering they're creating in the process ...
"Google, facilitating Evil all over the world!"
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