How I Made Money Spamming Twitter with Contextual Book Suggestions

http://blog.charleshooper.net/how-i-made-money-spamming-twitter-with-contex

by hoop • 16 years ago

109 69 16 years ago

blog.charleshooper.net

ritonlajoie2• 16 years ago

Even if it is spam , this kind of idea always amaze me.And everytime, I am jealous to not having thinking about it before..

How many of these bots are spamming twitter already ?

hoop18• 16 years ago

While I haven't seen any numbers, I think that there are alot of these bots. I have even less of an idea if any of them are contextual alot. Right before I was suspended, I believe that there was a report that came out that suggested that a large percentage of Twitter's traffic was caused by spam bots like these. I'll see if I can find the report and verify the numbers!

What I do know is that there are certain keywords that put you in line to be tweeted at for some product or website. Some keywords have more bots trolling the search API than others.

UPDATE: I wasn't able to find the report I was looking for, but I did find the following blog post. It contains a graph that shows that SPAM used to account for about 10% of Twitter's traffic. This number is now below 1%.

http://blog.twitter.com/2010/03/state-of-twitter-spam.html

fno• 16 years ago

That is a great idea and I do not find it too spammy. Twitter could implement something like that themselves as advertisement (simple context aware text ads).

hoop18• 16 years ago

It appears that Twitter is starting to move in this direction. I recently read that they now embed what they call "Promoted Tweets" (another word for an ad) in their search results. I'm wondering how long it will be before these start showing up in our timelines.

nowarninglabel3• 16 years ago

My keywords: "with, from, have, that"

I think the algorithm could use some work.

Also, the book suggestions are greyed out/faded. Makes me think there aren't any suggestions, you should make the icons come through in full color.

hoop18• 16 years ago

Sadly, I lost my corpus some time ago so until I pull more data from Twitter (I've got a script doing this as we speak) the suggestions are going to be a little weak.

The book suggestions are faded unless you mouse over them - if you click on them, you will be able to see a description of the book (as provided by Amazon.) I'll experiment with different design elements to see how I could make this more intuitive. Any suggestions?

nowarninglabel3• 16 years ago

Great to see a response. Regardless of your previous bot, seems like you have a good application now and it is worth getting off the ground. I will try it again in a couple weeks once your Corpus is rebuilt.

As far as the design, I would suggest the book icons come through in full color, and when you mouse over you could highlight them, or even better provide a short summary (just like how Netflix provides mouse over summaries of movie suggestions).

hoop18• 16 years ago

I have just added some stopword filtering until my corpus becomes more fully developed. Hopefully this will improve the results of the recommendations!

xulescu• 16 years ago

Interesting idea (to suggest based on already written content). Maybe it would be considered less "spammy" if it would be just semi-automated, i.e. more like an "expert system". Also, it it would work for popular forums like PHP BB or others, would greatly extend it's usage (so not just on Twitter).

hoop18• 16 years ago

Hi there,

That's a great idea. I hadn't thought about plugging it into a bulletin board system, but did think about trying to plug it into facebook. A recommendation engine plugin for phpbb, etc could definitely make the forum operator some additional revenue.

mike-cardwell10• 16 years ago

I'm surprised more people aren't speaking against what you did... I guess people aren't too bothered about spam until it gets above a certain threshold, and I guess it's only Twitters money that people like you are wasting by abusing their services and breaking their T&C's

hoop18• 16 years ago

Hi Mike,

HN is the best response I've received compared to any of the other sites that this link was submitted to, to include Reddit and Digg. Two thoughts come to mind:

1. HN is where we just saw a thread where users posted about the most unethical things they've done to get a startup off the ground.

2. I think that many HNers could relate to me. I was a broke, down-and-out geek/hacker-type that came up with an idea and took it on for the technical challenge. And, hey, I made a few dollars off of it, too.

mike-cardwell10• 16 years ago

Cool. So it's ok for me to abuse any services you launch in future, costing you money for my own personal financial gain? Sweet.

akkartik9• 16 years ago

The only mention of spam I see in Twitter's ToS: "You may not interfere with the access of any user, including sending a virus, overloading, flooding, spamming, mail-bombing the Services, or by scripting the creation of Content in such a manner as to interfere with or create an undue burden on the Services." http://twitter.com/tos

No mention of "unsolicited replies". Heck, for most early users, all @replies on twitter are unsolicited. Most of the time I have an exchange with someone before I follow them. Twitter's just designed to be more promiscuous than email. Anybody can see your tweets, so you're encouraging strangers with insight to jump in.

I think that makes what he did a grey area. Depends on how good his recommendations are, basically.

mike-cardwell10• 16 years ago

His posts were unsolicited, bulk advertising. How well they were targeted doesn't really matter.

hoop18• 16 years ago

Hi akkartik,

You make a good point, however Twitter's ToS was quite different back then. Their current TOS was updated: September 18, 2009 (this date can be found at the bottom of today's TOS)

That's around the same time my bot was suspended and Twitter's spam rates started to drop from ~10% to 1%

tomjen3• 16 years ago

The reason most people aren't speaking against it is that spam is just a class of information with a low utility rate, whereas useful information is information with a high utility rate. Sufficiently targeted spam is therefore not spam, but useful information.

lukev• 16 years ago

I'm honestly conflicted on this. On one hand, it's spam, as users are "receiving" messages they didn't solicit.

On the other hand, it's a kind of cool service, as an "enrichment" to twitter messages. If you could find some way of doing it for those who might find it useful without forcing it upon those who don't, I think this could be a great opportunity.

hoop18• 16 years ago

That's basically where I'm at now. Once my account was suspended I retired the spam bot. I even retired a similar project.

BookSuggest, in its web-app form, was the only way I could think of to use my existing technology in a way that wasn't, well... spammy. http://www.charleshooper.net/twitter/

The question I face now is: How do I take this application and deliver it to the user?

ritonlajoie2• 16 years ago

I'm not that conflicted...Sorry

joe-mccann• 16 years ago

I did this a long time ago, almost the exact same thing, but I actually parsed trending topics and searched Amazon for ANY product, not just books, based on the content of the trending topic. I started out with books, but moved on to all products. It was a cool project and netted me some cash but not worth carrying on so I dumped it about a year ago.

Was actually incredibly easy to do. I'm sure there are loads more out there.

hoop18• 16 years ago

Very cool. I hadn't thought of seeding the recommendations with trending topics. What kind of conversion rate did you get?

rb2k_• 16 years ago

Trying the website resulted in this:

  We recommended these books based on the following terms:
  schon, only, when, that

It's really weird that any of the suggestions made sense when words like these aren't blocked. The "schon" is German, but the rest should really not play into any ratings

hoop18• 16 years ago

Hi, thanks for the feedback!

Apparently my corpus isn't a large enough size to naturally filter out useless words like the ones you listed so I have added stopword filtering. Give it another shot and see how it works for you.

nerfhammer• 16 years ago

What did an actual recommendation tweet look like?

hoop18• 16 years ago

Hi nerfhammer,

They started out like "@{{user}} You should read {{book title}} {{shortened book url}}" but many people would take offense if the recommendation wasn't a very good one or the book touched on a sensitive subject (like weight.)

I had much better results with "@{{user}} Have you read {{book title}}? {{shorted book url}}"

mildweed• 16 years ago

$400.

Just go ahead and release the code. It didn't make you that much money.

hoop18• 16 years ago

Hah, nice try :-)

aspam2• 16 years ago

Posted from a throwaway account.

I make about 400 EUR every month from Amazon referals without actively doing anything.

I own a comunity fueld site (hosting pictures) that receives about 70k visits (20k unique) per month. Its just a little hobby project that runs itself and has been unchanged for 2 or 3 years now. It's hard to find advertisers due to the sometimes offensive content, let alone making money from banner ads.

So I did the next logical thing: putting an invisible iframe on the site that loads Amazon with my referal id. Anyone who visits my site and decides to go shoppind on Amazon in the next few days, still has this referal id stored in a cookie. Note that I don't actually link to Amazon anywhere. Conversion is soley based on chance.

My conversion rate is about 0.5% and I've been doing this for about 18 month now.

japherwocky• 16 years ago

hoop saw similar things with his affiliate links; a lot of the sales didn't come from the books he recommended, but once people were on amazon they'd end up buying something.

hoop18• 16 years ago

Yep. Peddled everything from "sensual massage devices" (which I had no idea Amazon carried) to e-books.

imp• 16 years ago

That's much different though. Those people were at least manually clicking on the amazon links and not having their cookie stuffed secretly in the background. I have a low-traffic book review website that makes $2/month from Amazon affiliates, and around Christmas someone bought a Kindle and I got credit for that, which was a nice surprise. All I ever linked to were books, but if someone starts browsing around Aamzon then you'll get credit for whatever they end up buying.

utnick• 16 years ago

yea I run a couple book sites and one time a person clicked on one of my book links and ended up buying a couple thousand dollars worth of camera equipment. Jackpot!

il• 16 years ago

This is called cookie stuffing and it's not only against TOS but also fraudulent and very illegal. You're stealing money from Amazon. The owners of Digitalpoint just got charged with wire fraud for this practice. If ethics don't concern you, you should stop simply because of the low relative reward and high risk.

paulgb• 16 years ago

It would surprise me if Amazon doesn't have an effective automated way of detecting this. It would be easy to detect based on user behaviour when they hit the Amazon page, and Amazon isn't known for throwing money away like that.

ig1• 16 years ago

Yes, Indeed. You could be charged with a criminal offence for that kind of activity.

minouye• 16 years ago

Not only is this unethical, it could land you in jail.

http://www.auctionbytes.com/cab/abn/y10/m08/i11/s01

ohashi• 16 years ago

All I can say is, nice work. It's creative. I've made some decent money off affiliate programs and twitter. What you're doing is similar in nature to what a lot of people are doing (human and bot).

hoop18• 16 years ago

Thanks for your feedback!

Sukotto• 16 years ago

This is an excellent example of the kind of advertising I actually don't mind getting.

1) Directly related to something I just said I wanted

2) You never advertise to me more than once.

I wish more advertisers (or even spammers) worked this way.

DotSauce• 16 years ago

Here's a legitimate way to make money from affiliate programs on Twitter. I make modest commissions each month via @ThemeHunter without promoting.

http://www.dotsauce.com/2009/10/28/affiliate-id-rss-feed-yah...

Vivtek• 16 years ago

Upvoted for finally naming that algorithm I've been off-and-on trying to research for the last year or so. Thank you!

hoop18• 16 years ago

Hah, thank japherwocky for that one!

How I Made Money Spamming Twitter with Contextual Book Suggestions

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