For those who haven’t heard about the click farms, they are services that can download free books, or borrow KU books so the author can get paid out of the communal KU pot.
Have Click Farms Broken Amazon?
Have you noticed an eBook on Amazon coming out of nowhere and suddenly hitting the #1 spot? Not just in the “Free” category, but also in the “Paid” spot. It’s possibly due to the author paying a click farm to get thousands of downloads. Amazon states that manipulating the stats is against their policy, but they don’t seem to be doing much about it.
David Gaurhran has documented evidence of a book using the click farms and has contacted Amazon. He was informed that the entire leadership team at Amazon was taking the scammer problem very seriously but felt the problem wasn’t quite as bad as he stated. It sounds like they are in denial!
Here is an article you should read on Kotaku.com. It has a video that shows in great detail actual banks of phones while in use. It’s hard to believe the amount of effort that’s put into this scam.
MotherBoard.Vice.com has an interesting article about a farm in Thailand where authorities seized over 500 cellphones and 350,000 SIM cards. A Chinese company reportedly supplied the phones and paid the men the equivalent of $4403 a month to run the scheme.
Besides Amazon, these farms also supply likes and followers on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest. App Store ranking manipulation is another service that’s widely used.
I can’t imagine it would take much effort to create a program to analyze these kinds of ratings and determine that they’re fake. I’m sure the farms would find ways around it but if it’s difficult enough for them they’d probably move on to other scams.
What are your feelings on this?
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VICTORIA EVERS is a paranormal fiction writer who feels really awkward referring to herself in the third person…. When she’s not vacationing in Narnia, you’ll probably find her reading, watching horror movies, spending time with her AMAZING family, or daydreaming about the newest story in her head.
Amazon best selling author, Barbara Goss, lives in Western New York and to date has written 28 Christian/Clean Romance books, mostly westerns. She enjoys crossword puzzles, penny slots, reading, swimming, and her two cats, but not necessarily in that order. She tries to write exciting stories with a bit of God’s word spread within, without dominating the story.
Luisa Marietta Gold was born in Pennsylvania where she spent a large part of her adult life. She moved to North Carolina after the birth of her only daughter. She published her debut novel, Escape to Osprey Cove, which is Book 1 of The Osprey Cove Lodge series in September 2016. The Osprey Cove Series was born from Luisa’s love of the Rideau Lake region of Canada, the outdoors, and lake life. She spent many years enjoying the Rideau region while staying in lodges reminiscent of the lodge in her first novel. She currently resides on eleven acres in her North Carolina home near an idyllic lake with her husband and several mixed labs. She spends as much time as possible enjoying the beauty of the lake. Luisa also does acrylic painting. The cover of her debut book which features The Lady Droxell on a Canadian lake was painted by her. It was very satisfying to Luisa to know that she created the entire project. There is a tea room not far from her home where one selects a hat to wear while dining as did Libby and Rosalind in the book. And sometimes they are silly! Luisa’s bio picture was taken there!
One could call me a simple dreamer–a wandering soul longing for romance, looking for adventure, and wondering what this thing we call life is really all about.