Here is an interesting post on Security Fix that highlights just how simple it is to artificially generate traffic to any website for the purpose of economic gain. 

Set up a free account at Robotraff and you’re ready to buy or sell Web traffic. Got 30,000 hacked personal computers under your thumb? Super! Now you can use those systems to generate a steady income just by pointing them at Web sites requested by a buyer.

Or maybe you’re just getting started and you can’t be bothered to build your own army of hacked PCs the old-fashioned way? No problem! Now you can set up a Web site that tries to exploit Web browser or browser plug-in vulnerabilities and simply buy all the traffic you need.

Robotraff is basically an exchange or a marketplace that puts traffic buyers in touch with traffic generators.  Traffic buyers are site owners who have relationships with various ad networks and can turn a profit by generating traffic to their site.  Traffic generators are bot or malware controllers who can direct thousands of “users” to any site at the right price.  As long as the price buyers pay for the traffic is less than the revenue they make from the ads on their site, its a guaranteed money tree (at the cost of the advertisers of course). 

At Anchor Intelligence, we’ve detected thousands of publishers who have been linked to programs such as these.  And the massive scale and sophistication of these operations is quite daunting.