Hoist on their own petard and all that, however…
One of the big selling points of the internet age is the ability to start a company for next to nothing, and then find customers online. 20 years ago there was simply no way a specialty olive oil store could have survived and thrived in my small town of 5000 people, yet now there is one - which makes much of its income from online orders. Advertising something like that was prohibitively costly in the past, and therefore would never have happened.
So methbot is faking video and ad views, and ultimately bilking the advertising buyers. Google and Facebook still get their cut, but the small (and big) time business owners get screwed by having to pay for advertising.that is viewed and clicked on only by bots. I speak from personal experience at pouring more than a few advertising dollars into the maws of Facebook and Google. The notion that I was paying to feed a botnet is terrible (and may help to explain why a good product was not getting a decent ROI for online advertising).
This actually worries me, as there is little to stop this sort of thing from happening in ongoing iterations. I suppose the big companies will be able to price it in, but the little people will again be left to fend for ourselves.
