Black Hat Marketers – Turn White Hat
Do I hate black hat marketers? No.
Do I want them to change? Yes.
Use the information you learned selling smut, spamming, or otherwise taking advantage of systems or people and do good with it. Use your black hat ways for good. That’s what I’m saying. If you hate me for it than so be it.
It’s not personal against any one person, it’s against exploitation model of making money. You don’t have to exploit to be rich. I believe that if you’re so good at marketing, you can definitely find value it undoing exploitation. By providing value in a positive rather than negative way online.
4 Responses to “Black Hat Marketers – Turn White Hat”
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December 29th, 2006 at 12:49 am
Now you’ve got me curious to the reason for this post? Did you have a run in with some black hats or simply just thinking about how they end up ruining things for everyone else?
I honestly wonder how spammers and black-hat people DO make any money. Do people actually visit links in SPAM emails? Do people seriously fall for that stuff?! It seems so ludicrous but it must be true. If there wasn’t money in it they would have stopped long ago.
February 2nd, 2007 at 4:43 pm
Janet,
Running link exchanges, generating misleading content based on geolocated IP’s or referrals, including content visible to bots but not users, that is grayhat stuff at best. Obviously Google will punish the hell out of you if they catch you (and they’re getting better at it), but it doesn’t go much further than that.
Then you have solid, if elementary, black hat activity. Plainly illegal stuff. Through tricking users, employing 0-day web exploits, or even well-known exploits to surreptitiously install “adware” and other programs to generate revenue. A lot of this spyware/adware/whatever provides a fee to the affiliate every time it is installed. It will deliver pop ups, report back browsing habits, etc. You may recall a case where some adware company was actually replacing page advertisements and links with relevant ads/links of THEIR clients. I believe they actually won their case, because the practice was “diclosed” in their EULA. Anyway, back to the actual blackhat activity. Using various well hacks, these black hats can generate affiliate income. There has been some new adware which is now scanning through outlook logs, e-mails and other information on a persons computer to generate contextual, targeted advertisements. The level of sophistication is getting pretty impressive, but this level of blackhat delivery remains about the same. This is about the technical level of the “phishers”, too, in my opinion. The ones that send out spam which represents itself as an e-mail from paypal, but provides a link to a dummie site just to capture usernames/passwords. They are outside the scope of anything SEO/affiliate related, though. I only include them because I believe their technical expertise is roughly the same. Finally, I should quickly point out that this is just the illegal installation of adware. As you well know, a ton of adware is installed legally, if surreptitiously, all the time.
The darker side of all of this is a whole different deal and has almost nothing to do with legitimate SEO/Affiliate work. At this level we’re starting to deal with rootkits, hacked virtual OS’s, compromising low level hardware, including bootstrapping and CMOS information. At that level, antivirus software is worthless, because it cannot SEE the offending code.
Even legitimate companies are working these angles, although they are lobbying Congress to legitimize them. The most famous ‘legitimate’ company to be caught doing this lately was Sony, with their ill-conceived rootkit that got installed off of some of their audio CD’s. I can’t remember how many hundreds of millions they settled with state attorney generals on that issue.
There is a lot to it. However, unless you’re really interested, expanding on these things probably isn’t very relevant to the content of your site, except in as much as these methods will increasingly be employed in click fraud, adware and ultimately, will cost legitimate e-marketers like yourself funds, because they will usurp your content and ads with their own.
I guess the key thing to remember here, is that once a blackhat can freely execute code on a client machine, that blackhat can negate every legitimate advertising effort you make, and redirect revenue which rightfully belongs to you into their own pockets.
DS
February 28th, 2007 at 11:59 am
Janet,
You do know that Marketing Sherpa did an article a few years back on lessons to be learned from the porn marketing industry. It should be in the archives, if you are interested. Also, I wonder how many blackhat’s actually bother contributing to or reading anything that improves their skills.
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July 7th, 2009 at 8:54 am
Hey, can I share your post with my readers? Let me know if it’s okay or not.