https://www.techspot.com/news/78029-over-40-percent-activity-internet-fake.html
Ever wonder about how big news organizations and publishers big and small report year over year declines in ad revenues and only Google is reporting year over year gains?
How does that happen?
Nice essay
How Much of the Internet Is Fake? Turns Out, a Lot of It, Actually.
http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/12/how-much-of-the-internet-is-fake.html
This is not particularly new, just the media coming to grips with what seo has been saying since the late 90s. I used to tell them 30% was bots, but no site owner wanted to hear it.
<added>
QuoteIt's all true: Everything is fake. Also mobile user counts are fake. No one has figured out how to count logged-out mobile users, as I learned at reddit. Every time someone switches cell towers, it looks like another user and inflates company user metrics https://t.co/tk1PKuvLL6
— Ellen K. Pao (@ekp) December 27, 2018
https://twitter.com/ekp/status/1078095527420383233
QuoteAnd if an unlogged-in user uses the site on multiple devices, each device counts as a unique user
— Ellen K. Pao (@ekp) December 27, 2018
https://twitter.com/ekp/status/1078141131567771648
>Every time someone switches cell towers, it looks like another user
That would probably account for the increase over the old 30%.
There are a heck of a lot of bots and spammers out there and those are just the "marketing purposes" bots that at least respect robots.txt.
A lot of advertisers are still blindly burning money, which incentives various forms of scams.
Sometimes while using a treadmill I play Microsoft solitaire to relieve the boredom. The ads they show there for me are often for 1 individual product (no frequency capping) and if I accidentally miss the close button when I click to close it registers as an ad click, which then forwards to a landing page on an ecommerce site that has an error in the URL, so it loads a 404 error message. I've probably seen that ad thousands of times by now.
Ad ad agency serving the above sort of client has every incentive to buy garbage inventory to pad out their own profit margins.
And publishers that see their own CPMs get clipped by all the scams also have an incentive to run ads on an extended network to bleed advertiser budget.
Almost all the incentive structures lead toward tragedy of the commons.
And as former local monopoly news publishers see their reach & influence decline, they get bought out by private equity in roll up plays, which have every incentive to squeeze blood out of a rock until the brand equity sits right around zero.
I LOLed when I saw this report, as well as the report on Chris Hayes show on MSNBC. I thought,"You're just now figuring this out?"