Fake Streams, Listening Bots, and Click Farms: Counterfeiting Attention in the Streaming Music Economy

Abstract

SEOClerks is a microlabor platform. Like other, better-known sites, such as Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, Crowdflower, and Fiverr, the platform acts as a virtual labor market, bringing together buyers and sellers of services. Those seeking to have tasks done can publish job descriptions, detailing, among other things, the prices they are willing to pay, while those looking for work can advertise the services they offer and the fees they charge, as well as make bids on jobs posted to the platforms. Where microlabor platforms like SEOClerks differ from other, more traditional labor markets is in the scale, distribution, and digital mediation of the services being traded: generally speaking, microwork consists of small data-processing tasks distributed among a large group of individuals working remotely via the internet (examples include labeling images and video online, transcribing audio, and classifying the sentiment expressed in a review or comment posted to a website). And where SEOClerks differs from other microlabor platforms is in the precise nature of the digitally mediated services being bought and sold. As its name suggests, the platform specializes in search engine optimization, the ethically murky practice whereby individuals and companies game search engines and recommendation algorithms in order to gain a competitive advantage over rivals in capturing the attention of potential clients and audiences. But even the phrase “search engine optimization” is perhaps too much of a euphemism to accurately describe the kinds of transactions the site