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Bots Now Account For 61% of Net Traffic

Posted by samzenpus on from the that-which-has-no-life dept.

codeusirae writes "A study by Incapsula suggests 61.5% of all website traffic is now generated by bots. The security firm said that was a 21% rise on last year's figure of 51%. From the article: 'Some of these automated software tools are malicious - stealing data or posting ads for scams in comment sections. But the firm said the biggest growth in traffic was for 'good' bots. These are tools used by search engines to crawl websites in order to index their content, by analytics companies to provide feedback about how a site is performing, and by others to carry out other specific tasks - such as helping the Internet Archive preserve content before it is deleted.'"

4 of 124 comments (clear)

  1. Youtube? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Didn't we just get studies that said youtube and netflix were 50% of the net's traffic?

    http://mashable.com/2013/11/12/internet-traffic-downstream/

    Was this just a ruse? Is this study wrong? Is there some sort of overlap?

    1. Re:Youtube? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      Oh make god. Suddenly everything makes sense. I was certain no human could ever watch a whole justin bieber video. It's the bots!

  2. 90% of the cells in the human body by goombah99 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    are bacteria. Viewed that way, basically humans exist to transport and feed bacteria. However that's 90% by cell count, not cell mass or total DNA. Looked at it that way the bacteria are assistants.

    The bot traffic is light weight it outnumbers human traffic in site visits not byte counts. It exists to serve us.

    --
    Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
    1. Re:90% of the cells in the human body by ColdWetDog · · Score: 5, Funny

      It exists to serve us.

      You must be new here.

      --
      Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!