There are massive bot farms that watch videos, click on ads, sometimes even do a download of the app after clicking and open the app. I've sometimes thought Google could cut out the middleman and just allow creators to outright buy 'views' on YouTube. You could pay like $100 to get 10,000 additional views which would translate to some additional ad revenue, which ad companies would know is inflated so they would discount the rates appropriately and no money would need to be sent to bot farms. This would also be far greener and need less servers and bandwidth and would be an overall win-win.
It's one thing to read about the click farms, but nothing can prepare one to actually see the videos of them in action - just visceral. It has an eerie Matrix-like feeling to it.
13 sec video of a Chinese click farm (quite loud):
This has been since what feels like forever. Once a couple of people I worked with found and penetrated one of these "click farms". We saw all the stats, the number where impressive.
I had a private contact within google's SRE team and spilled all the beans, ask where I should dump the information within google. The answer was as blunt as telling: no one would be interested since it would hurt their bottom line.
Tried to inform a couple of Googlies at different cons in the months following: as much as they liked the tricks we pulled to get in, as little did they want to bring the subject up in their teams.
But what about the workers. It's likely that those working at the bot farms aren't wealthy, and that they're from less wealthy countries. So this is good, addressing the immediate problem of energy waste, but doesn't address the underlying problem of wealth inequality that - in general - drives people to work on systems to rip others off.
Those who run the bot farms will find other scummy work, and no end of desperate workers.
