Slashdot Mirror
Traffic Fraud Inflates Video Site Popularity
Dotnaught writes "A new study by spyware researcher Ben Edelman finds that spyware-driven traffic inflation is common, particularly at video sites. The study identifies Bolt.com, GrindTV.com, Broadcaster.com, Away.com, RooTV.com, and Diet.com as the beneficiaries of spyware-driven traffic. 'Our measurement systems are inaccurate for the amount of trust we'd like to put into them,' Edelman said. 'So that's the puzzle: How do you build an advertising economy when the number can't be trusted?'"
When an ad is annoying (like all those in-your-face popups), at best they serve to get the ire of the user, get him to install popup blockers and other means of not having to deal with an ad.
How about a way to "rate" ads. Was this ad helpful? Did it provide information you actually wanted (I know, I know, but those things DO exist. But then, I also believe in the yeti)? Was it intrusive? Or downright nasty and obnoxious?
I'm pretty sure the advertising industry (the industry doing advertising, that is, not necessarily the industry that makes the ads) would be very interested in that information.
And as a nice side effect you get an immediate feedback about popup-abuse. Because they would most certainly be tagged "obnoxious", no matter how good the ad itself may be.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
FYI we have the same problem in Italy for the number of TV programs viewers.
There is a corporation, Auditel, which is in teory indipendent but in practice is owned for the 66% by the two biggest TV networks (RAI, the crappy public TV, and Mediaset the crappier Berlusconi's TV).
Their numbers are used for the prices of the ads and the result is that they always greatly overestimate the number of watchers. An infamous case was when, due to a technical problem, the transmission of a big channel was interrupted for 30 minutes and according to Auditel millions of people (a big percentage of the Italian population) continued to watch it anyway, without any interruption and without changing channel!
There's a hidden treasure in Python 3.x: __prepare__()
Many web sites will gladly sell you a place to put one of your banners. They will charge you a fee that is justified by the amount of visitors who will see your banner, further justified by estimating how many of those visitors would be likely to click on your banner and why.
For sites that depend on selling advertisement space to monetize, traffic scores calculated by third party sites like Amazon make or break your ability to get prime bucks for prime space on your web sites.
Comapnies who need to show an instant boom in traffic sometimes employ the use of spyware that can be signaled from a remote connection to begin "surfing" a given site from the visitor's IP address proporting to be the user's default browser type. Instantly, millions of people start surfing the target site completely unaware they're even doing it. Its a booming business, building and renting these networks.
You may not have heard of any of these sites, but I'm sure you'd pay top dollar to advertise there once you saw their traffic scores. Its a new cottage industry that thrives on Windows / IE users.
No, I've never heard of the sites either.