Thanks @fjtorres for the articles - call me naive again, but I didn't know that sort of stuff was going on. I totally agree that that sort of scam is bad for everyone who gets roped in by it, especially when it pulls in innocent authors used as camouflage.
But even after reading the articles, I still don't really get why folks are condemning eReaderIQ for this, unless folks are arguing that the site was one of the entities doing the fake clicking on the fake titles, versus just seeing price drops on some of these titles, along with many others, and therefore listing them as price drops. And if eRiq wanted to be in the fake-click business, why set up such an elaborate site, complete with the very real price drop monitoring algorithms and stuff?
(And no, @Cinisajoy, I really don't expect eRiq to monitor the quality of every book its algorithms identify as having dropped in price. I will agree that eRiq might WANT to try to do this, to provide better service to its users, but I don't EXPECT them to do it. I also wonder, even if eRiq did try to do it, where and how they might draw the line, beyond some of the examples you already mentioned as sufficient to get a title kicked off Kindle itself - e.g. "familial relationships for pleasure", "non-consensual for pleasure" - in which case the title won't show up in eRiq's lists anyway.)
Unless eRiq is a click farmer itself, is it really credible that eRiq was producing enough clicks for any given title to even be noticed when compared to the 25,000 page clicks produced by a scammer as described in one of the articles, especially when the point of eRiq seems to me to be to identify price drops on books so we can BUY them rather than KU them?
Anyway, until I might learn that eRiq is a fake-click generator itself, I continue to really value the price drop monitoring and price history services, and would be willing to pay a reasonable subscription fee for these...
Quote:
Originally Posted by fjtorres
It turns out the ebook click farming scam is getting more common and the farmers are disguising their practices by roping in legitimate books from innocent midlisters along with the ones they're paid to boost.
https://the-active-voice.com/2016/06...t-think-again/
http://www.thepassivevoice.com/2016/...rawny-authors/
As I pointed out above, the practice hurts everyone; readers, authors, and yes, Amazon.
Since it is relatively new in the ebook space Amazon seems to be fumbling around for a handle on the problem.
Probably going to get uglier before it gets better. |