How do website owners gain from facebook scams like this?

[MarieHaynes]

I've noticed two things that are going wild on Facebook this week:

http://timhortonsgiveaway.me/

and

http://promoforipads.net/

In the first scenario, you supposedly just click share and they'll send you a $25 Tim Horton's gift card.  (For those who don't know Tim's it is a very popular coffee shop in Canada).  There's no way this is happening...they claim to have something like 5000 cards to give away.

In the second one they're apparently giving away 1000 ipods.

Yeah...OK.

So, they're obviously scams that are just trying to get a few zillion facebook shares.  But why?

[MarieHaynes]

Thanks Sha, but I still don't get it.  What's the benefit of having ten thousand social mentions on a domain that will never get used for anything else?  Or do they eventually build something else on that domain and then create a backlink to one of their sites?

[ShaMenz]

The reason is fairly obvious...gaming search engines with social mentions.

This will never go away because there will always be masses of people out there who will think "what have I got to lose?". People recognize that if it's a scam all they lost was a click and if it isn't they'll get something for nothing.

The general public has no idea that a share is "worth" anything for a website and values a click at zero.

Sucks to be them if someone sees it and decides to let the engines know what is going on though eh?

Sha

[SteveOllington]

Yeah I see a tonne of this stuff but to be honest I just always use my better judgement and assume it as a scam, closing the window. However, you're quite right... not all web users are used to seeing this stuff and having that reaction, therefore there is bound to be some people that through no fault of their own are naive enough to fall for the scam and end up getting screwed over in some way or another.

I guess there must be something in it for the people who do it though, or they wouldn't continue doing it... sort of like the emails I get from Nigeria asking for my bank details... some people must give them or they'd have stopped by now. Such a shame, but in time with the younger generations being so internet savi I assume it'll die out, or at least I hope so.