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from the we-prefer-the-term-autonomous-agents dept.
A large portion of web traffic is due to bots, and has been for years.
How much of the [I]nternet is fake? Studies generally suggest that, year after year, less than 60 percent of web traffic is human; some years, according to some researchers, a healthy majority of it is bot. For a period of time in 2013, the Times reported this year, a full half of YouTube traffic was "bots masquerading as people," a portion so high that employees feared an inflection point after which YouTube's systems for detecting fraudulent traffic would begin to regard bot traffic as real and human traffic as fake. They called this hypothetical event "the Inversion."
[...] Take something as seemingly simple as how we measure web traffic. Metrics should be the most real thing on the [I]nternet: They are countable, trackable, and verifiable, and their existence undergirds the advertising business that drives our biggest social and search platforms. Yet not even Facebook, the world's greatest data–gathering organization, seems able to produce genuine figures. In October, small advertisers filed suit against the social-media giant, accusing it of covering up, for a year, its significant overstatements of the time users spent watching videos on the platform (by 60 to 80 percent, Facebook says; by 150 to 900 percent, the plaintiffs say). According to an exhaustive list at MarketingLand, over the past two years Facebook has admitted to misreporting the reach of posts on Facebook Pages (in two different ways), the rate at which viewers complete ad videos, the average time spent reading its "Instant Articles," the amount of referral traffic from Facebook to external websites, the number of views that videos received via Facebook's mobile site, and the number of video views in Instant Articles.
Can we still trust the metrics? After the Inversion, what's the point? [...]
Some metrics already measure the legitimate traffic as smaller than the bot traffic.
(Score: 2) by crafoo on Thursday January 03 2019, @01:01PM (11 children)
Imagine if the advertising companies no longer had confidence in Google/Youtube stats. How on Earth could they have confidence in the price they should pay at the advertising spot auctions? Why, the whole web would just come tumbling down! Maybe we can get some laws passed. Protect these adware sites. Protect the internet as we know it. Maybe get some sweet barriers to entry in there while we are at it.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Nuke on Thursday January 03 2019, @01:20PM (5 children)
It is just a matter of time before it is realised that advertising, and data for advertising, is worth no-where what is being paid for it at the moment. We are told that the ad industry earns and handles millions for this and billions for that, but that is only what is being received by entities at the top of the sales pyramid (like Facebook) in exchange for ad data and ad space. The money is being fed into the bottom by marks who are getting no-where near the value of what they are paying. When the marks realise this the whole over-inflated pyramid will collapse.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by khallow on Thursday January 03 2019, @02:02PM
There's probably two classes of advertisers. The first are the newbies trying out advertising because they heard it works. Those will be affected by a change in the perception of how effective online advertising is. There's the second group which knows it works because they already have ad campaigns that worked to generate business for themselves - metrics from self-interested advertisers be damned.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by nitehawk214 on Thursday January 03 2019, @02:14PM
I think this feeds in to the fact that companies like Coca-Cola and Pepsi spend absurd percentages of their budgets on advertising. They know their product costs pennies to make as the scales they are making it at, so they simply drown out competition in a flood of marketing.
"Don't you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -Loiosh
(Score: 2) by crafoo on Thursday January 03 2019, @06:30PM (2 children)
I think advertising works far better than most people realize. It's generally money well-spent.
(Score: 2) by MostCynical on Thursday January 03 2019, @08:12PM (1 child)
Redbull doesn't make any products. Everything is licensing and advertising - seems to work for them.
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 04 2019, @06:07AM
A can of Redbull in Oz is about $3. There is an off-brand drink, that looks the same, has the same flavor, and comes in the same size can. It costs $1 and sells reasonably well, but nowhere near as much as Redbull.
I used to work where the generic was sold, and it occasionally turned up in Redbull boxes.
That's right, it was the same stuff, from the same factory, and people still paid triple for the name.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by VLM on Thursday January 03 2019, @02:26PM (3 children)
Its interesting that theres a market of fakeness already.
Newspapers sell $7 of advertising per issue and retail for $1.50 (or whatever, its been a long time since I've read one) and there have been huge lawsuits over printing presses emitting directly into recycling bins. They can prove by receipts for paper that they printed 250K copies but they can only sell a smaller number, so in the recycling bin they go...
TV advertising companies proudly claim ridiculous statistics like the average American watches 8 hours of TV per day. Of course they are 1) twisting facts by failing to mention they're counting coma patients and nursing home residents and prisoners as 24/7 viewing regardless if they're actually conscious and watching or even present in the room 2) they're simply lying.
Its 2019, other than legacy neocon talk radio for boomers, I don't think anyone listens to broadcast radio anymore, but the reported listening stats are ridiculously high.
I mean, in an absolute sense if internet stats were 100% inflated, that's still better than legacy media.
This is aside from issues like "we got a budget, we'll spend it on what people actually see regardless of their ridiculous self promotional numbers" because no matter how the numbers are made up, there's more middle aged women paying attention to Facebook than legacy broadcast FM radio. Or more teen girls on instagram than reading old fashioned newspapers.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 03 2019, @05:01PM (1 child)
> I don't think anyone listens to broadcast radio anymore
One counter-data point -- I listen to BBC World Service (broadcast by local public/university station in USA) nearly every night.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by isostatic on Thursday January 03 2019, @11:34PM
I listen to WS and Radio 4 in the car. Don’t watch TV, don’t listen to commercial radio unless in a shop/taxi/etc
On holiday in a cottage this week - we put on TV on New Years even for the last hour to watch Big Ben. What an eye opener - 50 channels of dross, most with adverts. It was all nonsensical. We gave up, and put on “atomic clock” for he countdown, then spotify for auld lang syne.
However it turns out that not everyone is like me. People actually watch Tv. They listen to 5 songs and 10 adverts an hour. They enjoy having their brains warped by these messages. After three years of not having these adverts at all (since dumping the Ariel), it was eye opening to actually watch them again.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 03 2019, @08:40PM
$3 here for the incumbent newspaper. But isn't the Audit Bureau of Circulation still a thing? It was supposed to measure the actual distribution of advertising substrates, to allow ad placers to get a reliable idea of the spread of a publication, and the number of eyeballs they may reach.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 03 2019, @03:36PM
If advertising were really such a moneymaker, real ad firms like Saarchi + Saatchi and Ogilvy & Mather would have extreme valuations. I suppose some time we'll find out that Google's ads were just a front to countless millions received from governments to spy on people.