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A few years ago, I first mentioned the “three worlds” of the Chinese Internet in my article:
In China, there are three forms of the Internet. One is the media-fed Internet, aimed at overseas ipos. One is the grassroots Internet, a low-profile gold digger, as fierce as the Raptor. One is the Internet, deep underground.
This is probably the first time that the media has summed up the layers of the Internet in China (not to flatter themselves, please let me know if anyone saw the earlier description). I didn’t expect it to be widely quoted, and I’m a little proud of it.
In recent years, the topic of “dark web” is very popular, true or false, soon chengdu legend.
one
Before the mobile Internet came out, a typical Internet entrepreneur, habit action is to put Alexa ranking a bit of the site to see again, study what to do there is traffic.
When I regularly looked at the TOP 1000 websites a few years ago, I found a design flaw in Alexa business, so that I could see the relative real traffic of many websites, overjoyed and collected a batch of data. I haven’t talked to anyone about this, and I don’t think many people have discovered this detail. Unfortunately, Web site data doesn’t have much value these days. This is a small episode.
There must be traffic to porn sites. There still is. Ever wonder how porn sites are monetized? In addition to the porn sites we see on the list, there are porn sites large and small, or all sorts of sites that play around with it, and you can see that they still get a lot of traffic without promoting them.
Where is the traffic coming from? Give me the search engines.
two
If you search the name of a movie in a search engine, such as Google, you will see almost normal websites. If you add a keyword “download”, you will see a batch of movie traffic stations. Click on the movie traffic station, you can see a variety of grassroots tricks of “growth hacking” means, inducing clicks, pop-ups…
From search engine users, often a click can bring lots of PV to such sites, one is not good to use, 2 it is to have a demand, this time is not talking about user experience, user experience must be relegated, but because of strong demand for adhesion, users actually doesn’t matter, they can always click on all the way from the various routines, to find the content they want.
But some users will be converted, and not a small percentage.
How much of that traffic? It’s huge. It’s amazing. Never underestimate the enthusiasm with which users search for porn, pirated software, and pirated movies.
Just before we went on air, the number of weekly active users was over 200 million. Give me a feel.
three
Where did the original content come from? There used to be a term called “gathering,” which means catching things around by crawlers.
Statistically, this site has traffic. What can you do with traffic? Common mode is to join the network alliance of search engine, share to earn income.
Domestic search engines all have the business of network alliance. Take Baidu for example, baidu alliance gave advertisers 14.2 billion yuan in 2016. How many advertisers are there? More than 450,000. I am in Ali and Tencent who is in the wool of collect who flow inside say, big company actually all buy flow, buy flow for what? In order to get more advertising revenue. There are also specific scenes that can be broken down.
One scenario is, the advertiser invested more money, but I have no traffic to offer, what do I do? Want to know money to charge in don’t expect to give you a refund, at this time, through the network alliance station traffic can “consume” this part of the advertising funds. Another scenario is that the advertisements of some advertisers are the users of the traffic outside these stations, such as the underworld, private hospitals and pirated online literature.
So, when a search engine says it has blocked ads for a certain type of keyword, such as “synovial sarcoma” in Wei Zexi’s case, when you search the keyword in the search engine, you find no ads. Don’t give the manufacturer a thumbs up yet, remember to follow the lead to see whether the various network alliance advertising is still in? Of course I am.
Media reporters generally do not understand this, simple verification to go back to writing. In fact, if you search in a central city, you get different results than if you search in a third or fourth tier city. That’s where their technology is advanced.
four
Does the network alliance operator know that a lot of websites are even illegal? Of course. However, how to treat this part of the “partner”, the attitude is often ambiguous, sometimes seal, sometimes acquiesce. Sometimes, it’s a case of left hand over right hand.
Even so, these individual operators who have flow are still insecure, and are bound to seek more efficient and profitable ways to cash out. This is the group of people who are traffic sensitive, and of course have the shartest sense of smell, making money from every hot wave of the Internet.
From e-commerce, group buying to page games, P2P finance and small loans, and even online gambling… When the wind blows, these sites funnel traffic to the trend-seekers, and the rewards are not cheap.
When the tuyere comes, there are a large number of fleece party. Where there is a subsidy, the wool men come and collect the wool and bring the flow, but it is worthless. Some entrepreneurs just look at the data and think their business is developing well, but they don’t know that subsidies are siphoning off by the Wool Party. When subsidies stop, business volume immediately drops. Many start-up projects have died in this way in the past two years.
five
Wait, it’s that simple? Get a little edge ball content, the flow will be endless, okay? What are you thinking? It’s not that easy. Under normal circumstances, the accumulation of traffic on a website can not be done overnight. So what’s a quick fix?
There are, for example, traffic hijacking. Hijack user browser, tamper with user launch page, browser plug-in, Trojan horse… There are so many ways to do this. Even more malicious from the operator routing level directly, a lot of traffic can be directed to the target website. It’s hard to find proof to complain about an operator.
The target website must have stickiness of course, rely on what stick these innocent users who do not know? Porn is undoubtedly the best content, food and sex is also.
Some people say, traffic hijacking this kind of thing, is illegal? If there is enough profiteering, there will be people who take the risk and knowingly commit crimes. Besides, how many can we catch?
How big is that flow? How big, how big. As many as you want.
six
Before doing the Internet, every year to the end of the year, you can observe which company management problems.
The operation personnel of some websites, fast arrive at the end of the year, KPI sees finish not, channel does not have flow, how to do, make a special topic go up, put a lot of pornographic graph go up. Next, do a link temporarily on the small website of a few cooperation again, flow of rush hua rose.
I hate the word “porn.” It’s fucking porn, so just call it porn. It’s erotic. It’s erotic. It’s manipulative.
Internet companies with problems in management, outsiders can see a bunch of people working together to cheat. You don’t think the company knows that? What’s that saying? “It’s not easy for everyone.”
seven
Some friends say, you this is the PC Internet era of the past, mobile Internet era no such thing? Don’t tell me, some of them still work.
Can’t mobile Internet traffic hijacking? Still can greatly square hijack, you obviously want to download A installation package, download A good installation as A B App. How can ordinary users know what the problem is in the link, but also think their eyes, no place to reason.
Apple App store on the gameplay and patterns are also many, do see a small porn player, sell positioning software (deceptive), do free electronic novels, fortune-telling, steal to App add a shell… It sucks up the flow and diverts it somewhere else.
In the war between Didi and Kuaidi in the past, both of them harassed users with iMessage vulnerability. It was cheap and effective, but users were so annoyed that they did not stop to criticize the two companies. Now that he’s successful, he’s a new giant, and users have forgotten about it.
eight
There’s more dark traffic on wechat. For example, to a certain content platform to write a small yellow, male hero sexual ability began slag later strong, the description of the middle thousand and eight hundred words, you imagine, the end tells you, because he wore what what function of underwear… Taobao on some to sell, search a certain keyword on the line.
It seems so vulgar, it can laugh your teeth out. But you go to Taobao to search the sales of the product, and your jaw almost drops.
Black five kind (reduce abundant strong shrink to increase) what does the commodity rely on to promote? It is this kind of flow plus local turtle technique, but it works.
One of the more successful aspects of the wechat team is its unrelenting efforts to combat such dark tactics. Such a large flow of wechat, should not be able to control, but objectively speaking, the current ecology is still very healthy, far better than weibo.
nine
Soon double 11, the flow of e-commerce giants is not enough. So, pop-ups, spam messages, this time will be more.
What can we do? Suck it up.
Photo: Roy Lichtenstein
You may also be interested in these two articles:
Ali and Tencent who is collecting whose flow wool
Big Taobao flow past life
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