Bot Farms: What Are They & What Are They For?
The rising demand to increase online traffic has led to the evolution of bots. With the help of these notorious software agents, websites have been trying to generate fake bot traffic. Thus, bots are giving rise to the demand for bot farms. Through our trial and error, we discovered that bot farms are rising.
But what are bot farms? What are they used for? How do they impact real users and businesses? Let's find the answers to these questions.
What are bot farms?
Before jumping on the technical terminology, it's better to understand the basics. A bot (short for robot) is an application created to imitate human activity. A bot farm is formed when all these bots are collectively put together. We determined through our tests that a proper understanding of javascript code is required to create a bot farm.
Based on our observations, All bots are not usually available at one bot farm or location. They are connected to a controlling machine learning device that helps carry out all the repetitive tasks requiring human intervention. Setting up a properly functional bot farm requires minimal investment and labor. Thus, making bot farming a great source to earn a little extra.
Recently, bot farms or other bots have developed into a more advanced and sophisticated channel for generating fake traffic and clicks, making it difficult to differentiate between real human behavior and bot behavior. As the demand for botfarm or other bots to generate traffic and create a solid social presence increases, the number of bot farms also rises.
Difference Between Click Farm and Bot Farm
.png)
The term click farms may leave people needing clarification about the relationship between clicks and click farms. A click farm is where people gather and interact over a website through which they collect "clicks" to help a client's product, service, or website reach a larger audience.
Website owners usually hire people to do the task remotely using PTC (paid-to-click) sites or create a bot farm account to complete the job for a natural person. But, this whole activity is carried out behind closed doors. This straightway makes the activity fraudulent.
So, a bot farm and a click farm are not different. Bot farms are a type of click farm as both generate fake clicks leading to ad fraud and click fraud.
Tasks Performed by Bot Farms
The main purpose of using bot farms is to gain profits. A business owner earns money whenever a bot farm executes a task successfully. A few ways that people use bot farms to make a profit are:
Twitching YouTube views
Whatever money a YouTuber user earns through their channel directly relates to the number of views they can fetch. Businesses love to collaborate with people who have a greater audience. With bot farms, also known as view bots, people can manipulate this number, enhancing their overall profits.
Traffic on website
A good VPS Server is crucial to handle the daily traffic over a website. However, getting enough traffic is also vital to enhance the website's online visibility. Since attracting real-world users' traffic is not always feasible, a bot farm is a viable alternative. Bots help in increasing site traffic by manipulating the number of clicks.
Creating fraudulent PPC clicks
Our research indicates that marketers earns profit from ad fraud whenever someone clicks on their Google ads or PPC (pay-per-click) ads. With bot farm, these fraudulent clicks are created that can instantly make the PPC campaign or google search for a hit.
Manipulation over social media platforms
Social media bot accounts, with many followers and likes instantly, make the user and profile images look credible and popular. Bot farm manipulates the likes, comments, and follows, helping advertisers to increase their business.
Harms Caused by Bot Farms
Today, at least half of the global internet traffic is generated through bot farms. For a shorter period, this might be profitable for bot farm website owners and businesses who use manipulation as a strategy to sell out their services and products. But in the long run, bot farm has more negative impacts:
Creates tension over the site
With increased traffic, website owners need to handle more requests. If the requests are left unhandled, the increased traffic will be useless. During a layer 7 DDoS attack, the same plan floods the target website with malware code.
More than one IP address is used to attack a website to disrupt the normal traffic flow. Web servers like VPS Server are also affected during such malicious invasions.
Difficulty in analyzing the data
Reviewing the previous data to draft a well-performing plan is important. But when the majority of traffic is coming from bot farms, it gets difficult to create one.
Lack of conversion
Fake clicks mean zero sales. With a bot farm, people may find their sites filled with empty images, google ads, and much traffic, but the conversion rate remains stagnant due to serious click fraud and lack of human interference.
Popular Ukraine Bot Farm Crackdown
Due to the increase in bot farming traffic, several government bodies have started implementing anti-bot measures. One of the most popular bot farm crackdowns occurred in Ukraine's war-ridden country.
Through our practical knowledge, around March 2022, the Ukrainian government successfully destroyed around five bot farms and websites that were spreading misinformation and giving rise to panic. The bot farm operation was secretly set up in a computer security service in Kyiv, the country's capital.
There were around 1 million bots that were functioning under it. It is said that the security service body of Russia was operating the bot farm. With this crackdown, the world saw how extensive a bot farm network could create.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is a bot farm?
A bot farm is a click farm, but the former requires less interruption of humans. Each bot farm has plenty of bots functioning altogether. They might be located at different places but can perform tasks with the help and input of a controlling machine learning device.
How do bot farms make money?
Bot farms make money in various ways, depending on the specific type of bots being used and the goals of the individuals or organizations running them. Here are a few common ways that bot farms can make money:
1. Social media engagement: Some bot farms create fake accounts and use them to engage with social media content. This can include liking, commenting, and sharing posts, as well as following accounts. The owners of the bot farms can then sell this engagement to businesses or individuals who want to appear more popular or influential on social media.
2. Advertising clicks: Bots can be programmed to click on ads on websites, generating revenue for the bot farm owners. This is often done through pay-per-click advertising, where the advertiser pays a fee each time someone clicks on their ad.
3. Spamming: Bots can be used to send spam messages, emails, or comments to users, either to promote a product or to spread malware. Some bot farms charge a fee to their clients to send out these spam messages.
4. Data harvesting: Bots can collect data from websites, such as email addresses, phone numbers, or personal information. This data can then be sold to companies or individuals who want to use it for marketing or other purposes.
5. Account creation: Some bot farms specialize in creating large numbers of fake accounts on social media or other platforms. These accounts can be sold to businesses or individuals who want to create the appearance of having a more extensive online following or customer base.
It's worth noting that many of these activities are illegal or violate the terms of service of the platforms they operate on. Bot farms can also be used for more nefarious purposes, such as spreading disinformation or conducting cyberattacks.
Do bot farms respawn?
At the base of warehouses, there are chances that bot farms will spawn, and even after being killed, they can respawn.
Is it illegal to have bot accounts?
Social media sites like Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn forbid bot accounts and bot activity over social media platforms. They can suspend or terminate your accounts if they detect a real person is not handling the account or profile. In a few countries, for example, it's illegal and a form of fraud.
Is it illegal to build a bot farm?
Building a single bot is acceptable and legal, but a bot farm isn't. They increase the chances of spreading the virus. Sometimes, bot farms can inspire panic, leading to alarming situations.
What is the main purpose of creating a bot?
Bot (short for robot) is a programmed software application that completes specific tasks requiring human intervention. Most importantly, it reduces the stress of completing tiresome work.
How to identify a bot activity?
Although it's difficult to track whether you have jumped to a bot farm-infested website, identifying and detecting a bot farm is not impossible. Here are an example and some links to a few points that you can keep in mind to find one:
Users abandoning their carts at an unusually high rate
A high spam volume of spam activity
High click rate but low conversion
Unfamiliar source of traffic
How are bots created?
Bots can be created using a variety of programming languages and tools, depending on the purpose and platform of the bot.
Conclusion
As indicated by our tests, bot or automated non-human traffic covers approximately half of the internet traffic. So, how can one determine whether the various bot traffic or accounts in the game you are playing have legitimate popularity? What is human behavior towards a product, game or service?
It is a genuine concern about anti-bot measures that marketers have been facing. Bots are not just used for spreading malware; they work as crawlers for indexing the web and collecting important information. Battling with these tiny scripts is not feasible; instead, using a bot farm cleverly can help gain maximum benefits.
Kavita Verma (LinkedIn) is an experienced content writer with over 10 years of experience in the field. She has worked with several tech companies, including Unisoft Technologies, NIIT, and Infotech, and has written extensively on a variety of technical topics.
