Slashdot Mirror
How Much Internet Traffic Is Fake? Turns Out, a Lot of It, Actually. (nymag.com)
Long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo shared this article from New York magazine:
In late November, the Justice Department unsealed indictments against eight people accused of fleecing advertisers of $36 million in two of the largest digital ad-fraud operations ever uncovered... Hucksters infected 1.7 million computers with malware that remotely directed traffic to "spoofed" websites.... [B]ots "faked clicks, mouse movements, and social network login information to masquerade as engaged human consumers." Some were sent to browse the internet to gather tracking cookies from other websites, just as a human visitor would have done through regular behavior. Fake people with fake cookies and fake social-media accounts, fake-moving their fake cursors, fake-clicking on fake websites -- the fraudsters had essentially created a simulacrum of the internet, where the only real things were the ads.
How much of the internet 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...."
[N]ot 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 80âpercent, 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.
On Twitter the author also shared a Twitter thread by the Washington Post's director of advertising technology, who shares his own complaints about the ecosystem of online advertising. "The problem isn't just that the internet is full of fakery and bullshit and bad numbers and malfunctioning metrics and bullshitters and fraudsters. The problem is that all the fake shit is layered on top of other fake shit and it just COMPOUNDS itself... Like you get fake users, who get autoplay videos which no one is really watching....
"That's not even counting the entire ad campaigns that are fake where the product is just a bullshit excuse to collect data on you."
How much of the internet 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...."
[N]ot 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 80âpercent, 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.
On Twitter the author also shared a Twitter thread by the Washington Post's director of advertising technology, who shares his own complaints about the ecosystem of online advertising. "The problem isn't just that the internet is full of fakery and bullshit and bad numbers and malfunctioning metrics and bullshitters and fraudsters. The problem is that all the fake shit is layered on top of other fake shit and it just COMPOUNDS itself... Like you get fake users, who get autoplay videos which no one is really watching....
"That's not even counting the entire ad campaigns that are fake where the product is just a bullshit excuse to collect data on you."
Who can tell the difference?
https://twitter.com/TitaniaMcG...
Titania McGrath can.
I'm not sure why the part about Facebook inflating ad display numbers is included here. That was not because of bot activity. The majority of FB traffic is consumed through their mobile apps (95% of it), and you can be sure that is not bot type activity. Facebook has gone to great lengths to prevent scraping of their website, and it is extremely unlikely that the scraping of the site would involve scrolling through a newsfeed so that an ad became visible, began autoplaying and was streamed to a bot.
Facebook misrepresented the amount of time a user sat watching an ad before they scrolled on past it, plain and simple. More than likely they were counting things like a small portion of the video still being visible on the screen as being "watched". For the difference, even by Facebook's own admission, to be off by 60-80% shows this was a misrepresentation of what it meant for a user to watch a video ad on a very large scale (including in the app on mobile platforms).
Better known as 318230.
It really is quite difficult for me to feel all that sorry about advertisers and ad sellers being upset that their precious data is wrong/overstated/contaminated. The "ad wars" [on users' eyes, ears, cpu, screen space, bandwidth, patience] are so insane now, the anarchist in me is almost happy about it.
Ooops, another site that wants to shame/annoy/warn/block me because of my ad filters protecting my privacy/sanity/bandwidth/battery/security. Hmmm....
Advertising is black magic and always has been. The internet has shown ad peddlers that they don't actually know all that much about advertising, but now they can measure every aspect of their ignorance, hubris, and ineffectiveness... and it freaks them out.