The map of where the views come from is expected (Russia, India, South East Asia).<p>The bit that I find most interesting is:
> Vass says that he keeps 500views.com running by paying a monthly retainer to "a number of high-traffic websites to have them run hidden scripts."
>"The script contains the YouTube link we need to increase views on..."<p>Looking at the map, you have to assume that the high-traffic websites are specific to those regions. Otherwise you would expect IP addresses from other countries to show up more often<p>Is there a (relatively) easy way of scraping for these malicious tags to create a catalog of what websites are hosting the malicious code?<p>You could pay for the view boost service. Scrape the top 5,000 sites in those regions of the world and hope your bot gets roped into being part of the botnet (as you could identify the video you paid to boost). Just an idea.
Buying fake traffic removes the first hurdle. People are social, and instinctively don't trust something that has not been endorsed. It's like walking by an empty restaurant - you assume the food must be bad.<p>But it doesn't get you past the second hurdle. If you have bad content, no-one is going to share it. Which means zero percent growth. Zero percent growth on top of half a million paid-for views is still zero real visitors.<p>If you have good content and can ethically reconcile buying traffic, I guess this tactic could work. But if you can't, you need a network of people to help publicise your launch.
My experience is that buying likes, views, installs, etc. works for niche products that need to rise in rankings. You rise a few spots, then organic kicks in, and you have just the edge needed to take over the competition.
This is why I'd rather be a Google(YouTube) than facebook or twitter. Imagine all the fake accounts, likes, bots, unknown spam that are giving us the next geocities.<p>It's simply cheapens everything about social media in general.