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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, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 03 2019, @04:31PM (2 children)
1. We don't support analytics so we block it.
2. We can see the legitimate problems with analytics (such as bots) and recognize that the advertising industry is built on shaky ground.
You can take your rusty irony and shove it up your fetid asshole.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 03 2019, @07:22PM
The reports on the internet that my irony is rusty, and that my asshole is fetid, are fake.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 04 2019, @07:02PM
Yeah, that guy claiming that because we block analytics we have no reason to gripe at their accuracy must work for some sort of metric related company.
We're not the ones contributing fake metrics. In fact, our lack of participation is helping the industry figure out who is really fake -- not that they have an interest in doing so. As noted, the whole pyramid will collapse into ruin if everyone really understood that i block spam and have html disabled in my email client and run no script and umatrix and filter on my firewall and make dns entries for sites with many scattered IPs that I don't want anything of mine visiting and
it's hard to call it complaining when I comment on how the system I had to take actions to force my opt-out of (since often, there is no offered choice to do so) is not working well. Even the people actively contributing are not generating as much data as the bots.
probably, the bots are from competitors to someone. Or people like me that used to run a mouse mover and one of those applications that would pay you to watch ads. I just let it run all day like how bitcoin mining worked. I only got a few checks before that company went out of business--but the checks they sent were real and they actually paid in full when I cashed them.
Those bots are doing the same thing at scale, and these metrics the industry has... are more accurately reflecting bot profits than people. Only the real suckers install weather channel apps or facebook messenger. Even the bots don't do that, and the bots are what generates most of the traffic to influence advert sales and impressions.