Andrew

misuse their system these systems are huge and complex algorithms likes follows and a whole ad network he wondered if he could manipulate any of that to his benefit same thing with youtube he's able to break anything into the front page of youtube and i guess i quickly became the guy that you would go to um if you wanted to sort of like gray hat black hats and stuff

My favorite thing at the time was like jacking.

It was a weird time period because it was before fan pages.

So initially when Facebook first launched, you could only friend request somebody and there was a 5,000 person limit.

And what you used to do is you would hide the request friend request button or when fan pages launched the fan follow button, but you would hide it in the pixels.

I don't know if you've come across that.

in our case we ended up using a lot on video uh or photo sharing websites so when people were clicking like next or going through video or or photo carousels every time they were cooking we sort of trained our users to double click and we started buying these websites that were high volume websites and then eventually we started doing web development for other sites and then putting these in there and what would happen was our hypothesis was that people did not

log out of their Facebook, it's cached in their browser.

So what we would do is just hide that pixel inside of other websites.

And so we could drive millions of fans to things.

and so that's kind of where we started a lot another thing we did in the early days was a kind of an ad arbitrage at the time for example when you when you charge an advertiser they cared about time on site and sort of cpms but they didn't care that much about the actual click through or engagement with the ads they just weren't aware i know that seems obvious now but back in the in the 2000s like no one really knew that those were metrics to look at

like traditional advertisers.

So what we would do is we had these high traffic volume websites and we would, for example, have a $5 CPM, let's say, but we could buy traffic for like a dollar.

And so we would blend enough garbage traffic in that we didn't really ruin our overall sort of time on site or user stats, but we would be able to sort of print money

And another one that we did that was really interesting at the time was around YouTube.

So we figured out that you could basically... There were these pop-under ads back then, and you could...

most people recognize them from the sort of like penis enlargement ads and things like that you click out of a website and there'd be like the annoying little open browser underneath it we would load it with youtube videos on mute and we were able to rack up you know hundreds of thousands of plays uh to a youtube video quickly and if we could get three to four hundred thousand views um

quietly in the background, we could basically break into the algorithm on the front page.

And back then, people would go to the front page of YouTube to see what was trending.

So we would be able to break a bunch of different content pieces onto the front page of YouTube.