Last week we launched our first wide scale CPC Opportunities in SocialSpark. On a high level things went great. We generated a lot of high quality traffic for our advertisers and the system worked as planned. However, a small group of bloggers decided to try and take advantage of the system by participating in click farms, repeatedly clicking on their own links and other forms of click fraud. Those bloggers have been permanently removed from the system as of this morning.
We track an incredible amount of information for each click on our network and pass that data to Click Forensics, an independent third party auditor. Click Forensics helps us identify fraudulent activity, automatically invalidates clicks and flags suspicious bloggers. IZEA also does a manual review on our end to make sure everything is kosher.
The links provided in SocialSpark are for your blogs or the social media networks listed on the get code page. Do not use those links on other CPC advertising networks, click farms, link sharing services, etc. You will be identified, you will not be paid and your account will be permanently disabled. We take click fraud very seriously and have zero tolerance for any violators.
Invalid Click Rate on Twitter and Facebook
I wanted to address the invalid rate on CPC social network links. Social network updates receive a high number of invalids due to spider and bot activity. It is not uncommon to see a 30% invalid rate on these links, especially if you have a small amount of friends or followers. We do not consider this to be fraud. There is no need to be concerned if you see a high invalid number on these links.
We want you to make money with your blog and social media profiles. Do so in an honest way and we will both prosper : )
