Blackhat Marketing

Submitted by kaerast on 21 August, 2009 - 07:10

We've all heard about there being money to be made in the underbelly of the internet, about all the money people are making through harvesting emails, sending out spam and link building but most of us aren't aware of numbers and so I've spent the past week or two investigating blackhat marketing techniques and some average prices for decidedly dodgy behaviour. So here are some numbers for you

$25 is how much you will earn by selling a single subscription to many adult webcam/chat/porn sites. Others will provide you with ongoing monthly subscriptions, and a few dollars a month for each subscription adds up to a tidy profit. However, the market in porn is largely saturated; webcams are less saturated, especially if you know how to market yourself well, but it's still a popular market.
$15 will buy you 1000 Gmail or Hotmail or Yahoo accounts. Depending on the provider, these can be custom addresses of your choice or can be configured to forward to a certain email address. Customisation will usually cost a little more, this figure is average.
$1 is how much you can earn by completing 1000 captcha tests. You actually need to complete 3000 before you get paid, and incorrect captchas mean you will inevitably need to complete more than 1000 to make a dollar. This is perhaps one of the lowest wages you can earn in blackhat marketing, and your efforts will often be used to sell email accounts (see above).
20 cents is the maximum you will earn each time somebody clicks on an advertising link you have posted to Twitter. If you can build up a large number of followers and stay on-topic then you can earn a fair amount of money, but it takes work building up Twitter accounts with lots of followers. There is also much discussion about whether the companies running these systems are trustworthy - there is no way of verifying they are telling the truth about number of clicks, they are keen to claim you have cheated, and don't like paying out.

There are also many more schemes, stealing lots of content to make an autoblog and then filling it with affiliate adverts and mass emailing to name but two. I've always been curious about blackhat and other 'dodgy' marketing techniques since somebody tried hiring me to setup spam servers in South America, but it's a rather narrow line between investigating them and being accused of "Associating with malicious hackers" and "partaking in black hat activity".