There are so many ways to make money online. Some, as in this story, leverage an information gap.
My sites are evergreen info with direct ad/af revenue streams. Including offering coupons.
While some have national reach most are much more geolocation constrained; from individual store to municipality to province/state to region...
Naturally the marketers want to withhold them from folks outside a coupon’s specific market range as (1) it dilutes campaign analysis, (2) forces potential sales lower, and (3) creates brand and retailer costs when customers attempt redemption outside anticipated participation boundaries.
So I have various methods in place to appropriately connect coupons with visitors. About a year ago a particular VPN IP was flagged as bot while scooping up Montreal (Quebec, Canada) area coupons, and blocked for 72hours. While I don’t block VPNs per se it seemed the use of this one for automated coupon retrieval was worthy of investigation.
First I did a previous year’s data trawl and found, to my dismay, that a significant rising coupon business coincided with an associated rising VPN presence. Looking back further there was a correlation that had been quietly present for years but had seen a huge uptick in previous half year.
Note: not all VPNs are as opaque as they advertise.
The one that caught my eye was actually a user in Algeria. Over the next several weeks I found others in Algeria and France but especially in India. My question to myself was why would someone(s) in Algeria/France want to scrape (mostly) Montreal coupons? Why would someone(s) in India a want to scrape coupons targeting (mostly) various municipalities in Canada and the US?
The answer was fascinating.
The scrapers have sites targeting minorities in specific languages, ie Arabic, Hindi, Punjabi, and offer them the coupons for a fraction of their face value. A hypothetical example: a dollar off someBrand tuna offered for a dime.
It’s a real genuine coupon that will actually save the customer the dollar except that instead of that customer getting it for free they are paying ten cents to a scraper site middleman.
Updated bot and coupon-client connection methodology.
Gave the story to several local language community media.
Added cautionary explanatory content to site.
Credited my coupon marketer clients with explanation.
Fascinating.
But #*$! irritating.
Note: the business of coupon scrape and resell remains; most scrapees are oblivious.
So I have yet another “value offered” to help sell my services!
