| First of all, there are different types of bots. Some are (or virtually indistinguishable from) real people, typically in Asia, performing simple tasks a la Mechanical Turk. The bigger networks though appear to be completely automated, and what's really important is that they they don't look "fake" in a sense that they look, and act, like a typical user. Spam is a grey area, since automation is so wide-spread now. Should be noted that some of the top marketers on Twitter are very prolific. Guy Kawasaki has posted 138,000 tweets since 2007 - that's more than 60 tweets a day, every day. Don't mean to pick on him, there are hundreds like him. I've seen accounts posting thousands of messages a day. Simple act of promoting something very actively from the same address isn't enough, it's done by legitimate marketers all the time. Keep in mind there are different sources of ad revenue, and there are multiple parties involved. Twitter will count an ad impression when the message is viewed "above the fold", for example your iPhone Twitter app displays the promoted message in the active portion of the screen, which implies you can "see" it. I believe that bots do not have a significant effect on this particular type of revenue. However, many commercial deals involve a different definition of 'impressions': Number of tweets promoting the product x number of followers the promoting accounts have
... and that's where bots play a huge role.So, this is getting too big for posting here, if anyone is interested in this, I can blog. This topic is surprisingly complex. |