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Where there’s money, there’s fraudsters. And X / Twitter is no exception. If anything, it’s worse there because of the enormous amount of bots and the brand new revenue sharing system without sophisticated fraud detection in place.
While I’m not a huge fan of creators relying on ad revenue, I’m a fan of platforms paying creators for their time and that’s what X has finally done. Of course you shouldn’t rely on it, but it’s nice that you can get a bit of kickback for spending every waking hour stuck engagement farming on the app.
But that was just something I knew happened somewhere at the back of my mind. Because hey, it doesn’t affect my day-to-day whatsoever.
That is until I came across a post by Gothic Therapy mentioning a botnet that’s been farming ad revenue from
I’ve spent countless hours exposing the vast bot networks on this platform, all designed to deceive you. In return, I’ve become their target. For months, these bots have been attacking me by creating fake accounts to impersonate me, stealing my content, and spreading deceptive… pic.twitter.com/HFJx32U4UC
— MasteroftheTDS (@MasteroftheTDS) October 13, 2024
The bot network
As it turns out, a massive portion of the botnets going on over there can be directly traced back to software by Vietnamese group VNXNet.
Now what’s impressive about this tool is that it allows users to bypass the captcha methods and set up accounts to be eligible for monetization on autopilot.
Meaning someone using this tool can create hundreds of accounts eligible for X ad revenue with a click. Makes your thoughtfully crafted threads feel worthless doesn’t it?
Update: This botnet issue has somewhat been solved by X forcing ID verification on all users in order to get monetized but the botnet itself remains after multiple takedown attempts.
I just discovered that the VNXNET bot network I helped Twitter/X take down is back online as of 6 hours ago…
— MasteroftheTDS (@MasteroftheTDS) September 5, 2024
What strange timing.
How do I know they're active again?
Call it a hunch, and this video of them running the program. pic.twitter.com/Ih7VtDpExo
What this means for you
Ok ok, there’s a huge bot network sucking up ad money and Elon’s probably gonna put the ban hammer on them soon. But why does this matter to you? Well, 2 things.
1. The easy monetization window will close soon
X will likely have to increase verification standards or raise the threshold to get monetization in some way that eliminates or makes botting too expensive (this is more likely) to be worth it for the majority of abusers.
That means run to meet the eligibility standards asap if you’re close because you might not meet them in the future as they change the system to better keep out the bots.
2. Monetization will eventually include X premium
It seems to me, obvious that X will eventually favour promoting X premium to as many users as possible because a paying user will always be more valuable than an ad-consuming free user.
In order to do that, X premium users would cannibalize the ad revenue share in the replies causing a reverse incentive for creators to disincentivize premium users. The only way to rectify that would be to add revenue share for X premium users in the same way YouTube does with their own premium program.
In fact, incentivizing that in the long term would likely reduce the overall amount of ad revenue bot farming as they’d be competing for a smaller pool of income (this assumes a major portion of bot interactions are not subscribed).
Good news is, you would make more money on revenue share over time if X is continuously promoting premium users and don’t have to deal with seasonal ad rates.
Closing thoughts
Obviously there’s no way to completely eliminate bots on social media, especially when there’s monetary rewards involved. It’s more of a game of cat & mouse where if you get the incentives right, you can make it too annoying for them to play on your platform. But it’s not like X or any of the other platforms will lay down and let the fraudsters make money off their backs. But what’s the ultimate solution?
To me, the only way forward is a payment barrier like a subscription as it makes the average cost of these botnets ridiculous. On the other hand, how can X do this without turning away free users which would be the bulk of their userbase?
X has already opened up ad revenue share so it would be like putting the genie back in the bottle now that everyone’s gotten a taste of it. That’s a problem for X staff to figure out.
In the meantime, enjoy the ad revenue but don’t rely on it. Chances are there’s gonna be half a dozen or so major changes to it before the payouts are predictable.