Anyone who has a blog with an open comment option has encountered malicious online bots. Log in to your Wordpress dashboard, and you'll find hundreds of new comments. Deceptively, they're not often people excited about your eloquently penned prose, but rather systematic bot programs plugging their own products to your regular human readers.

But the world of malicious bots is taking a turn beyond drowning your blog in sales comment threads. According to the "Bot Traffic Market Advisory" from Solve Media-a website security firm with more than 6,000 clients such as AOL-bot traffic increased significantly for the first quarter of 2013, costing brand advertisers an estimated $3 billion online and $1 billion through mobile devices. 

But bots don't create themselves. That's what Ari Jacoby, co-founder and CEO of Solve Media, thinks about bots: Someone is behind it, and it's usually someone looking to gain an unfair advantage.

See, not all bots are bad. In fact, similar to most tech, the use of bots was initially purposed for extending the reach of brands across the internet, such as software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies that automatically feed a series of posts, comments, and links to all of the major social media sites and groups. "These services can be understood to be bots in the sense that they, too, are automated ways to push things out," explains Scott Frangos, president of WebDirexion, LLC, a content marketing firm that provides website security as one of its services. He recommends using social media for authentic, human-to-human connections, citing that robo-posting to an extreme is never a good tactic. "That said, we do automatically schedule some postings via tools such as Hootsuite, since it's tough to be everywhere at once," Frangos adds.

Bots are malicious when robo-posting becomes more about, well, being malicious. "In the case of advertising, a bot might go to a site and be programmed to click the play button on a video so that the click-per-play spikes," Jacoby explains. "This suggests to the advertiser that there was great performance, although there was almost none. Bots make fake registrations on sites, fake likes for pages, fake votes, post spam links in comment sections: they falsify the effectiveness of ad campaigns."

Earlier this year, Microsoft and Symantec Corp. discovered the Bamital Botnet, and they joined forces to take it down. The botnet attacked more than 8 million computers in a span of 2 years. On Feb. 28, U.K.-based Spider.io discovered what is known as the "Chameleon Botnet." Initial results showed at least 202 targeted websites (with at least 65% of the traffic attributed to the botnet) and more than 120,000 host machines in the network.

Jacoby explains in more detail how these and other botnets work, even going beyond the creation of fake ad clicks and selling fake website real estate to advertisers. "Media ad agency personnel have access to research tools that help them to find good publishers for a certain demographic," he says. "Through those tools, advertisers are very likely to find things that look very attractive." For example, Jacoby explains, you could be looking to advertise a product or service directed toward individuals living in the St. Louis area. You can certainly go to sources you know and trust to purchase banner ad space, such as the local St. Louis Post-Dispatch website. "All of a sudden, a site pops up that's called stlouisisawesome.net and it's showing great results and lots of traffic, so they buy an ad on it because it's cheap and has good results, but it never had traffic to begin with," he says. The web traffic was the result of malicious bot activity, because the website was set up by bot programmers to hack into a share of the ad revenue going around.

"Malicious bots will actually commandeer a server and might even take down your site, or perhaps be more sneaky about it and use your existing site to promote their own products," Frangos says. "Usually their goal is to reroute your traffic to something that will make them money. This directly impacts your ad revenue by pulling eyes off your content and your brand."

Frangos sees a multitude of bot attacks on WordPress-based websites, extending beyond blog comment spam. He cites an example through one of his clients: a high-traffic HVAC company based out of Florida. An interior page of the company's website that received high page views was hacked and replaced with an ad redirecting to another website. "We had to hunt for the code insertion, and then reinstall and overwrite the entire CMS code to root out the attacker," he explains.

Mark Stevens, CEO of the marketing firm MSCO, believes that if you're the least bit suspicious of a site's authenticity, steer clear. "It's like me saying to you, ‘Give me $1,000 right now and wait here-I'll be back in five minutes with $2,000.' I'd be a walking bot." Instead, Stevens recommends using your company's mission and your personal intelligence to avoid engaging bots that comment on blog posts, spam your Twitter account, or try to propagate your marketing budget. "The issue is not the bot, but the people that allow them to manipulate," he says. "Any aspect of the internet is filled with sand traps. You could just stay away, but that's ridiculous because life is sand traps. Instead, go in and be skeptical of everything you do."

Frangos provides suggested steps for additional security. "Learn about the best security technologies for your server and content management system," he says. "Work closely with the technicians at your hosting location, since they will help with firewall and server level controls." He recommends implementing proactive controls, setting up an alert system, and drilling the team for best practice responses to attacks. Jacoby adds that site owners should demand third-party website traffic research from vendors in order to hold them accountable.

All in all, stick with advertising on websites you know you can trust and don't respond to comments or Twitter messages that are clearly meant to hook you rather than create a business relationship. As Stevens points out, the old adage rings true here as it does in many circumstances: If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.  

(Image courtesy of Shutterstock.)

When you think of the Pulitzer Prize, you probably envision large news organizations with deep pockets running in-depth investigative series and being rewarded for them with the industry's most prestigious prize. But this year, you'd be wrong. A small company with just seven employees, only three of whom are full-time reporters, took home the prize, beating its better financed competitors.

The company, InsideClimate News, doesn't even have an office. It's a lean operation in which all three reporters work from different locations, reporting on climate stories they think are important. The winning entry was, "The Dilbit Disaster: Inside the Biggest Oil Spill You've Never Heard Of," which, according to The Wall Street Journal, began as a three-part series and expanded to seven additional stories about the spill and related regulatory issues.

This small company was able to outmaneuver the big boys, because it pays attention to just one area: the climate. It's worth noting that The New York Times closed its environmental desk earlier this year. Because large news organizations are letting news like this slip, the smaller organization with a laser-focus is able to fill the gap.

In fact, this is the pattern that disruptive companies typically follow. They find ways to run leaner using digital tools, and then they find an area of the market that bigger players haven't paid close attention to, and they exploit it. Whether it's software, steel, or news, the pattern is the same.

And what we're seeing here could represent a way for in-depth news to survive in the 21st century. Larger news organizations are working with shrinking budgets and looking for ways to focus on more local issues. For instance, in March, The Economist reported that the Los Angeles Times may be sold to local buyers, who could emphasize a more local focus after earning a reputation as a top national paper for many years.

One of the site's founders and principal reporters, David Sassoon, told Forbes it's still possible to do in-depth investigative work, but it could require a different way of approaching the problem, one that large organizations used to working with big budgets and huge staffs might not be able to grasp. "I think it's possible to do a lot of journalism on low budgets without necessarily feeling like you can't do the job you want to do. Maybe a lot of the newsrooms can do it more efficiently than they think they can. There are plenty of individuals, newsrooms, little ones here and there, that can do this kind of work," Sassoon told Forbes.

This could represent an opening that few people believed existed. The New York Times suggested that the reason the Pulitzer judges picked the plucky publication was because it wanted to make a statement that you don't have to be a big shot to be recognized-that there are ways to get the story out-and that today's digital tools open up a world of possibilities that we might not have imagined until now.

It could be ironic, in a way, that the internet-which disrupted the traditional news business model so completely-could also represent the answer to journalism's most pressing problem: How do we continue to cover news that matters? It's possible that small operations watching niche markets could change the news as much as craigslist, Google, online advertising, and instant access to news did to the traditional newsroom.

InsideClimate News has taken a different approach to financing its operation, looking at unusual ways to cover its operating costs. It has built a nonprofit organization and worked to find grants from organizations that don't traditionally finance news outlets. Certainly, winning a Pulitzer Prize brings with it a level of prestige that should help the organization to grow and thrive-and to get more money, whether it's from organizations recognizing its work, or by using its cache to crowdsource the cost of covering a particular story.

What InsideClimate News has shown more than anything, though, is that a small group of committed individuals can find ways to tell stories that truly matter without a ton of money. And that has always been the story of the internet. It has broken down barriers and given people with an idea the means to see it through without a ton of financial backing. And it might be that this little company could embody the future of investigative journalism: small, lean, and totally focused.

The Washington Post Co. has long been owned by the Graham family, but it revealed on Monday, August 4, that it had agreed to sell the flagship publication to Jeffrey Bezos, most famous for founding Amazon, Inc. The Washington Post says that Bezos will pay $250 million in cash for it and affiliated newspapers.

The sale includes The Post and washingtonpost.com, the Express newspaper, the Fairfax County Times, El Tiempo Latino, and others, along with the Robinson Terminal production plant in Springfield. The deal also included the Comprint printing operation which produces several military publications.

Interestingly, the deal does not include The Washington Post Co.'s popular digital-only publications, Slate and the Root, or the WaPo Labs digital development operation. Nor does it include the company headquarters, or Foreign Policy magazine. With this purchase, Bezos will take the paper private and will be free to do as he pleases without shareholders to answer to.

(washingtonpost.com) 

The Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Council, a global executive affinity group of more than 6,500 senior marketing executives, announced the launch of its new Content ROI Center website. This resource is dedicated to helping marketing organizations improve the performance and return of their growing investments in content origination, multi-channel formatting, targeting, and delivery across the entire customer lifecycle. 

The new Content ROI Center features executive interviews, case studies, thought leadership, research, and conversations focused on the strategies, technologies, and practices of digital content initiatives.  Marketers and communications executives from companies like BMC Software, Deloitte, DocuSign, Lexis-Nexis, IBM, BT, SAP, PwC and others are featured contributors to the Center.  The Center is co-sponsored by NetLine Corporation, the CMO Council's content syndication partner. 

(contentroicenter.org)

The EContent 100 is our annual list of the companies that matter most in the digital content industry. Companies that wish to be considered for inclusion on the list may submit their information via a form on our website. Our judges will review the submissions and vote on which companies make the final list.

Submissions are now open, and will close on August 23. The final list will be included in the December 2013 issue of EContent. 

blinkx, an internet media platform powered by CORE that connects consumers with advertisers through professionally generated content online, entered into an all cash transaction with Grab Network Holdings, Inc., related to its Grab Media property.

Grab Media is an online video content syndication and advertising platform. The assets acquired by blinkx in the transaction will enable the company to add incremental audience and augment its relationships with advertisers, publishers, and content providers.

While the transaction is not expected to have a material impact on the revenue or cost base in the near term, it should enable blinkx to accelerate the growth of its recently launched syndication efforts, including blinkx VideoAdvantage.

 (blinkx.com, grab-media.com)

Aquafadas, developer of digital publishing solutions, announced it has added two new features--Progressive Downloads and ImageMagick support--to its Aquafadas Digital Publishing System version 3.0.

The Aquafadas Digital Publishing System lets publishers add interactive enrichments to content. However, some of these enrichments call for larger file sizes that cause longer downloads. With the new Progressive Downloads feature, consumers can select and begin reading their favorite section while the download goes on in the background.

Aquafadas v3 now leverages ImageMagick technology to automatically resize graphics, eliminating the need to edit images in external programs such as Adobe Photoshop. Users simply insert images into the layout, and the Aquafadas Digital Publishing engine resizes the graphics to display on any given smartphone, tablet, or desktop system.

(aquafadas.com)

Mobile apps bring content straight to your pocket. The convenience is unparalleled, but there may be one part of the app chain you haven't thought about much: the buying process. Chances are you just go to the Apple App Store or Amazon App Marketplace and never think about it, but if you're a content provider, some experts think you should be putting a little more thought into distribution.

"A content provider has a choice. It can build its content into a native app and sell it through Apple for iPhone or iPad, or an Android store like Google Play. Or the provider can build their content in HTML or an Android app, and either way sell it using their own commerce platform just like millions of physical products are sold on e-commerce sites, and deliver it as an Android app to a web browser on any device," says Cliff Conneighton, VP at hybris. "In the app store model, the provider must typically give the app store 30% of revenue, and gets no information about who bought their product. In the commerce platform model, the content provider gets 100% of the revenue and has total flexibility and total control of all information."

But selling apps through your own site presents challenges of its own. Not least among them is getting the word out. Having a central repository, like the App Store, makes it easy for people tosearch and ultimately find what they're looking for. But Conneighton disagrees.

"I argue that the large app stores have become very inconvenient for users. Google's and Apple's stores each have over 1 million apps available. Finding what you want is not convenient," he says. "Is it easier to download an app or to just click on a URL and get the content immediately? And if you have a strong brand that users seek, like TIME or Good Housekeeping... it is much easier for users to find all your content and related brands on a website that the brand controls than on an app store next to 1 million titles they don't care about."

That's all well and good if you're TIME, but for smaller players, visibility is key. But Conneighton would argue that the benefits of moving to an owned e-commerce platform outweigh the drawbacks. "One of the great things about digital content is that it is alive -- the content provider can not only know who bought the content, they also can know what they are reading and what they skip, and can make relevant offers in context. "Liked this article on St. Martin? Click here to buy our 'Guide to the Caribbean.' 'We see you only read the gardening articles in our home magazine. Click here for more information on our archive or gardening articles.' You can only build this kind of relationship if you own the real time digital customer information -- and the big app stores won't let you do that."

Many content providers have already moved to HTML5, web-based apps to get out from under the thumb of the app stores. Famously, The Financial Times moved its content to a web app after Apple tightened its rules for in-app purchases. While there are plenty of pros and cons to be weighed before shunning the app marketplaces, it may be time to take stock of your app priorities and consider if a new approach is right for you?

(Image courtesy of Shutterstock.)