Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by Fnord666 on Thursday January 03 2019, @12:39PM   Printer-friendly
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.


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 2) by crafoo on Thursday January 03 2019, @06:32PM

    by crafoo (6639) on Thursday January 03 2019, @06:32PM (#781599)

    Bots taking over the majority of web traffic - not the same as a small minority of people blocking unwanted (and unauthorized) access to their computers.

    Starting Score:    1  point
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   2