This page has been archived and commenting is disabled.
Epic Bot Fraud: Up To 50% Of All Publisher Traffic Is From Fake Clicks; Billions In Ad Revenue At Risk
One of the more entertaining stories of the day has to do with the crackdown by Instagram to purge millions of fake users, in the process exposing "celebrities" who were such only thanks to the excessive purchasing of followers, but worse, once again revealing that on the margin, the biggest growth for social media services such as Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and so on, continues to be from fake accounts originating at shady clickfarm spin offs, whose only job is to collect modest fees in exchange for "following" or "liking" with non-existent accounts that will never engage with the user, or with advertisers.
Here is what the NYT said:
This week, we got a look at just how many junk accounts there really are on Instagram, the four-year-old photo and video sharing service owned by Facebook. In what has been called the “Instagram Rapture,” the company is deleting all the accounts it had previously designated as “spammy” from the follower counts of its users. And for some high-profile accounts, a lot of users have been vaporized.
No account has lost more users than Instagram’s own main account. More than 29 percent of Instagram’s followers, or 18.9 million users, disappeared from Wednesday to Thursday, according to a graphic of the top 100 Instagram accounts compiled by Zach Allia, a software developer.
Celebrities also saw millions of followers vanish. The singer Justin Bieber lost 3.5 million fans, or 15 percent of his total, according to Mr. Allia’s calculations. Kim Kardashian lost 1.3 million followers, or 5.5 percent of her fan base on the service.
It's not just the service used by people to share artistic images of their dinner: every other comparable outlet, where popularity or punditry is determined by followers, shares or likes is subject to the same rigging. A rigging so pervasive across the entire social media industry, that advertisers will have no choice but to notice, as every day they blissfully keep their heads in the sand costs them million in lost revenue.
Here is the math: according to Adweek, bot fraud, digital advertising's albatross, will suck $6.3 billion from the industry next year, according to a much anticipated report highlighting the threat from the Association of National Advertisers and WhiteOps.
Needless to say, this is important to very important for the likes of Facebook, Twitter and others, whose revenue and cashflow is entirely driven by projections of future ad spend by their clients, ad spend which will implode when after several years of being ripped off by robotic, inert eyeballs, the ad-spend budgeters decide they have had enough of being ripped off by bot farms, and put social media spending on hiatus until the social media outlets fix this issue once and for all, a fix which in practical terms is impossible.
From AdWeek:
Bot fraud is among the digital ad demons the industry has been trying to excise. The report outlines some of the risks associated with programmatic ad channels, but there are technology-minded players who feel such automated advertising networks could eventually solve the fraud issue.
Industry group Interactive Advertising Bureau recently set up a special task force called the Trustworthy Accountability Group to combat fraud. "Research like this is critical in building a program that will excise this type of criminal activity out of the supply chain," Linda Woolley, TAG's CEO said in a statement today. "Fraudulent traffic, as well as malware and IP piracy, are obstacles to the growth of the digital economy, and TAG is committed to eliminating them."
Here is the stunning scope of the problem, per analysts at SunTrust Robinson Humphreys:
- Up to 50% of publisher traffic (!) is bot activity, just fake clicks from automated computing programs.
- Bots account for 11 percent of display ad views and 23 percent of video ads.
- Between 3 percent and 31 percent of programmatically bought ad
impressions were found to be from bots, with an average of 17 percent. - More than half of traffic from third parties claiming to lift publishers' traffic numbers comes from bots.
- Digital advertising will take in $43.8 billion next year, and $6.3 billion will be based on the fraudulent activity.
- Even the top publishers setting up private advertising exchanges to cater to elite brands are unsafe. Ten percent of ad impressions from such premium programmatic campaigns are from bots.
- Bots are corrupting retargeted ads because of more sophisticated user Web histories than actual users, attracting cookie-based ads. Nineteen percent of retargeted ads, the ads that are directed at an intended audience based on previous Web activity, are from bots.
The ball is in your court, dear advertisers.
»
- 20062 reads
- Printer-friendly version
- Send to friend
- advertisements -
Hurry! Short Facebook......ahh nevermind
Facebook a fraud?
Yahoo a fraud?
Stockmarket a fraud
Financials a fraud?
Statistics a fraud?
Obama a fraud?
Let it burn, baby
Google knows this, of course, and they could prevent it.
What can advertisers do, when Google has a monopoly.
Fake, fake, fake but AnalOG is real!
We clicked on some folks' ads.
Just wait until we can vote for our dictators online. Crime of the century.
Kardashian a fraud?
Not in this country
Should be a simple test to check for correlation between "clicks" and actual sales.
You could say the same thing about HFT.
Barron's ITS DIFFERENT THIS TIME
I am shocked. Shocked.
Bots buy emini's; do they not buy Russian brides?
http://y2u.be/VI6tBwVjyOY
Bots buy emini's; do they not buy Russian brides?
http://y2u.be/VI6tBwVjyOY
this article is so rich coming from the website that now is running ads across the top along with the guest contributors........lol GO PORSCHE
The system must be gamed and everybody is paying. That's how Google does it but they have better programmers.
Installing Ghostery on your browser will take care of those ads, btw. Just sayin'
So true, and eventually only the bots won't have Ghostery installed. Hows that gonna work out for content businesses? I worry we may see a lot of paywalls in our future.
As they say in Chicago: 'Vote early, Vote often'
If you like your cliques you can keep your clicks.
So do all the web based businesses join hands,
and jump off the burning building together?
Yup
As I said half a year ago, imagine all the fun of the TYCO fraud, but now its with fake clickbait links and rebate advertising dollars.
On a related note, you can look at digital signatures in much the same way you can hunt for fake clicks using modified turning tests if you know how long it takes human operators to respond to a frequency condition
http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/live/2014/dec/19/obama-fbi-sony-hack-...
Sending My regards.
Remember the pay-to-surf companies that paid you to have their banner on your page?
AllAdvantage, anyone?
http://community.fortunecity.ws/business/simplot/1182/images/adbar/allad...
aint that the truth. but what can i say? google paid my rent for about 6 months. then they banned me. they actually ban ALOT of legitamate people for reasons not exactly clear. i think their analysts must meet a quota or something. google is basically skynet
"google is basically skynet"
Google is basically the NSA
just wait till we go quantum. johnny depp will upload himself to the internet and create an army of nano-tech cyborgs
Ah! This explains why this site is 80% advertisements and nearly unusable on a mobile.
Ah! This explains why this site is 80% advertisements and nearly unusable on a mobile.
May I suggest using Orweb and Orbot? Blocks the ads and cuts data usage.
Hey, the whole thing's fake....it's the Matrix.
Just keeping gnawing on that steak and hope you don't wake up to find it is your tongue...or worse!
If we can only get the bots out of the markets. Crash and burn
I am shocked, shocked I say...
but if you've ever read reviews for an e-book, you kinda, sorta, probably could figure out where they come from.
<---- Social Media Fraud.
<---- Central Bank Fraud.
Internet, What's it good for? Creating Narcissistic Idiots everyday who believe in TPTB.
WOW!
50% is fake traffic.
The other half is me, but only for the porn links.
I'd say a large part of the other half is accidental clicks from people trying to click the X and get rid of the freaking ad. This, of course, is not accidental on the part ofthe ad designers. Damn them to the hell they have brought to us.
"I'd say a large part of the other half is accidental clicks from people....."
Confession:
I sometimes intentionally click on ads of places I don't like just to cost them money.
Maybe futile but it's therapeutic.
What about robot porn? Surely the clickbots look at that on their lunch break?
"We faked some people"...bitchezz
pay per click is voodoo. and try to get google or yahoo to substantiate the activity.
We derive a substantial portion of our sales revenue from Google Adwords. There are advanced tools (besides what Google offers) to track bot clicking, but, for the most part, it is a moving target. And, yes, Google could stop bot hits in an instant, but we just add it to the cost of doing business. It takes but a few moments to learn Adwords, but a lifetime to learn how to manipulate it to reduce your costs.
Google actually does an acceptable job of weeding out bots. No one else does.
Acceptable?
When they could stop it entirely?
A little early to be hitting the hard stuff, no?
By the way, if that is you, Eric, +1 on banging Lisa Shields. You should have seen her in college.
Right, no technology company could possibly do anything right. Got it.
Google went through a lot of lawsuits on this matter, being that billions are spent through their platform. This happened many years ago. AdWords has been around for going on a decade.
Red herring...
Right?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fallacies
Sure, but that wasn't my argument. See below about the lawsuits and the fact that fraud impacts their business heavily.
And in any case, determining bots is a very difficult thing to do. You dismiss that as if you know what it actually takes. Not much information is transmitted on http gets, and they can be easily manipulated. I've worked on that problem extensively.
Very difficult like determining who shot down Malaysian Airlines MH17 very difficult?
Or very difficult like determining the North Korean government hacked Sony very difficult?
In the end the only thing we have are probabilities. Such is life in any system with weak data collection.
Google Analytics is anything but weak, not to mention Google's internal capabilities, which dwarf it by at least a few orders of magnitude.
The biggest change I noticed on my Android [google] tablet after upgrading from jelly bean to kitkat was that I was having tons of accidental ad clicks after the "upgrade".
Go figure.
Didn't weed you out.
"Needless to say, this is important to very important for the likes of Facebook, Twitter and others, whose revenue and cashflow is entirely driven by projections of future ad spend by their clients"
They forgot ABC media...
Bots buy emini's; do they not buy Russian brides?
I LOLed.
So the New York Times is going to lay off more people...good...
Thank god for Addblock Plus, Noscript and Ghostery.
They constitute a national security threat and must be eliminated.
+1 for Addblock Plus, best browser enhancement I've used to date.
Noscript was always a little buggy for me though.
As additional step I nullify doubleclick Facebook Twitter and few others in hosts file. If then a page looks handicap or refuses to load I know it's not worth my time
Ghostery is a joke. After you install and set it up it continually whitelists "special" cookies, which are just new advertiser tracking cookies. It's another sucker product that advertises something but secretly compromises security.
buggy how?
Never noticed a problem before but I see it gets regular updates
It periodically would cause conflicts (often freezing my browser) with sites/apps and would not turn off even when I disabled it and when it did it would often turn itself back on. When programs begin telling me how to run my computer and defying my commands they are deleted and blacklisted: I'm a "Ctrl/alt/del" type of guy and do not have any patience for programs that do stuff I do not want.
As soon as I discovered ABP I cut all ties to NoScript.
I'm doubting NoScript was the cause - never seen this happen & I've been using it for years. It also can't turn itself back on - it has no such control.
Kim Kardashian lost 1.3 million followers, or 5.5 percent of her fan base on the service.
Fan base??? You have to be a special kind of stupid to be a "fan" of Kim Kartrashian.....
23.6 million total human beings (minus a few fake accounts) find Kim worthy of being followed.
Winning!
They just be checkin' her booty out from the prime vantage point...
How is this fraud? It sounds like the bots are doing exactly what they are supposed to. At this point in human history if you believe the add print on anything you should self lobotomize with a power drill for the sake of the species.
It isn't
Just another faulty prop that produces nothing and benefits nobody, well unless your the one collecting the revenue..
What will these millions of useless spammers do when it all ends?
"What will these millions of useless spammers do when it all ends?"
They will eat each other and give blowjobs in the park for tacos and prepaid data refill cards for their 'smart' phones.
Can't ZeroHedge afford it's own bot. So we don't have to try and swim thru these ridiculous ads any more.
exactly, They are not really anonymous anymore when you think about it. Makes you wonder if they sold out because the ad revenue has an address and bank account.
Why make anything, when billions are being generated by electrons..
Kind of like our reserve currency, or bitcoin..lol
Nonproductive shysters have inherited the world, at the expense of the producers, and nature is not amused...
This planet really does need a purge.
$6.3 billion based on fraud clicks? Meh, the fed can print that in in a couple days. Free money for everybody... except for those people who really need it.
I'm a bot.
1001010011010100010100101010001010101010010100010101-- means fuck you Yellen.
01101110011011110010000001101001011101000010000001101001011100110010000001110100011010000110100101110011
011001100111010101100011011010110010000001111001011011110111010100100000011110010110010101101100011011000110010101101110
ROGER-ROGER
I'm old school:
-/.-./-.--/.-/-./-../--/.-/-.-/./--/./.-../---/.--/./.-./--/-.--/-. . ./.-../../-./-../. . ./-.--/---/..-/..-./..-/-.-./-.-/../-./--./.-/--/./.-./../-.-./.-/-./-.-./..-/-./-/. . .
“The company says that up to 8.5 percent of its users or 23 million 'used third party applications that may have automatically contacted our servers for regular updates without any discernable [sic] additional user-initiated action.' In other words? Robots.”
http://failedevolution.blogspot.gr/2014/08/monitoring-hyper-automatizati...
I thought about starting one of these bot businesses 3 years ago. Just guarantee a web marketing shop increased clicks. Shave a fraction of a penny off their click payment.
How much is a click worth ? Like $.001?
My buddy talked me out of it saying that it was fraud. I said their payment schemes are a farce and marketing executives are morons
I've missed out on a lot money in my life not being a total bastard. This country is fucked up.
I'm ashamed to say that I know somebody who does this, even developed the software for it, (I asked him to share the easy life, he won't) totally automated, linked to paypal etc. his piggy backs other adverts, when you click 1, 5 pop up. The money this nonesense generates... if you only knew...
Fuck advertising. I wish it would all go away. Advertising ruined scenery and the internet.
But how will we know what to buy?
lol!!!!
When I look at all the shit invented, there really is not much in our lifetime that was invented, which we need to survive. Think of all the crap invented from baby boomers on down. I can't think of one thing needed. Its the same tools 100's of years ago still used today for survival. Some could argue medicine but when you think about medical bullshit, its so retarded. We see a doctor hoping we do not die but its the only guarantee in life. Its ironic and comical.
It's been said a million times before, but medicine, in its recent history, has only extended life on the wrong end. Call it being alive, but not really life. I know this from daily experience in my job. I'm a part of it. Good sewers and clean water have done much more for us.
Come on. A pill....that spontaniously gives you a boner and another prevents the comb-over.
That's progress, lads.
Once robo poontang is perfected, invention stops....forever....outside of upgrades for same.
/s
Then: Fake Tits
Now: Fake Clicks
ya but bots buy things, like stocks - so what's the problem again ?
Just like on ZH, they pop these ads up where you'll click for something else, I must hit 10 ad clicks a day that I had no intention of clicking on.
You still are not running an ad blocker? After 4 years?
This explains the Kardashian "popularity".
Only 5.5 percent of it, I'm afraid. The rest is still completely inexplicable.
"rest is still completely inexplicable"
The general and gradual darkening of unused gray matter.
They'll be back.
This was just figured out now? In the time of algos? NOW? Ha,ha,ha, ha ....
It's way higher than $6.3B imo. Nobody talks about Google when it comes to "revenue enhancement" via click fraud because everyone is afraid of them.
If you want this year's homecoming parade in my town you have to pay. [/Carmine De Pasto]
Great minds think alike!
Put post a few seconds apart!
Google actually has ads that match searches. I'm sure there could be click-fraud but I'm also sure the one time ads are a match for what people want instead of harassment it's there.
Amazingly, Google is unaffected by this kind of activity, even though they are the king of click-through advertising.
Here’s the real kicker --- ad expense is 100% tax deductible.
So, we all pay in reduced tax revenue with which to pay back the Fed for borrowed money to create these click ad companies in the first place.
My favorite Babylon 5 quote -
"Google is Mother, Google is Father."
Wait a minute. The publishers are trying to remove the fake traffic? But aren't they the ones who benefit from the fake traffic through increased ad revenue?
I don't even understand how internet ad sales work. Who pays the bot creaters to generate the fake traffic and ad clicks? Wouldn't that have to be the publishers?
Hopefully Twitter will do the same...I'm so sick of the posers & fakes out there.
The cam girls bait and switch BS is driving me crazy.
I can help. Don't use twitter.
Twitter? What's Twitter?
Just "Click Next", "Click Next", "Click Next"….
Quite a morning for ZH, trying to keep up with all the global dishonesty. Let's see, a record number of e-mini contracts were bought in the first five seconds of trading today; a Greek vote bribery scandal comes to light; yesterday's Russian gold selling story is debunked as pure bullshit; Plunge Protection Team shennanigans go front page; HFT, it turns out, is responsible for three-quarters of the European "market" "activity"; and now social media are revealed to be bot-infected frauds.
Against all the evidence, I'm still hopeful that Truth will have the last word, but I'm starting to wonder if I'll live long enough to see it.
If you had included the US government scandals and dishonesty you could have easily listed another 200 to 300 pages of descriptions…
You'll live long enough to see it.
It will just be disappointing. Which, is par.
I have not clicked on an ad pn purpose in the last 5 years
I use AdBlock. I haven't seen online ads for a long time.
I have an obscure little blog with 30-50 visitors/day and I get, on average 350-400 spams a day.
I can't figure out who even remotely benefits. It take me @ 10 seconds/day to click "empty spam".
My conclusion - much of this phenomenon has to be simple adolescent malice - the modern equivalent of calling a drugstore to ask if they have Prince Albert in a can, or the old flaming paper sack full of dogshit on a stranger's front steps trick.
Welcome to peak complexity. When the system(s) are so complex that nobody really understands them things like this happen. Another example is blaming NK for Sony. There simply is no way to prove or disprove the accusation so let us begin bombing asap.
This kind of rampant fraud diminishes their brand.
These companies need to get back to basics and create applications/services for a fee. Start charging $5/month and see how many fraudalent accounts disappear.
Many of you may not like the concept of a Twitter, but I believe a microblogging platform is quite useful.
Here's a revenue model for Twitter. $5/month for individuals, $10/month for a business, $100/month for a public figure and $500/month for celebrities. Charge additional (monthly/annual) fees for a longer user name. Charge users additional fees if they want to tweet longer than 140 character messages, etc.
If Twitter moves towards a revenue model, they'll get rid of the riff raff, solidfy their brand and offer a more valuable service to individuals and businesses alike. There isn't a business in the world that wouldn't pay$10/month + other fees for utilization of a Twitter platform.
Nothing wrong with a company actually making $500M or more a year for life...it's better than licking wall streets ass for more debt and a higher valuation every 6 months.
I am seeing a number of sites that I visit (for large on-line companies) start to add that squiggly letter login - even at sites that have a user name and password login. The only purpose of the squiggly letter match is to defeat bots -- so you know it must be a problem.
bots taking more human bots jobs.
OT ZH advertising getting sneakier. Porsche ad looked like a regular commentary link. sneaky sneaky
we botfrauded some folks
Tyler,
If I clicked on an add on this site, it wasn't the result of a bot.
It was accidental or....it was boobie related in some way.
Hope this helps, bro.
With a recent update of android I am seeing a large percentage of erroneously triggrred clicks - for a while I was experiencing about 2/3 of clicks were erroneous I would expect this is likely due to government promoted efforts to simulate a healthy economy. Also I've found that search engines other than google seem to experiance performances issues in android and lastly I find some links are almost nonresponsive but will work if I right click and force open.
And speaking of things that begin with f I am hearing yong adults saying that facebook brings to many problems and prefer instagram.
I used to work in the business. Its kinda common knowledge or at least understood-but-in-denial. Ad networks in particulalr are a cesspool. What' the difference between hoola hoops and social media? Anyone? Buhler? People actually used hoola hoops.
Get rid of all blog ads:
https://adblockplus.org/
On sites that I would like to support, and which do not test my patience with overbearing, distracting, and/or profane ads, I disable AdblockPlus.
I would do that for ZH, but their ads are obnoxious.
Well, duh. How else could my roommate's friend's Nigerian mom's sister make an extra $8300/month in her spare time from the comfort of her own computer desk...barring having an HD webcam in her toilet bowl?
"HD webcam in her toilet bowl"
A cheeky version of "The Truman Show"?
Bots are the people Citizens United conjured.
Ha ha ha ha ha. The fraud never ends.
62% of articles on fake clicks are themselves fake.
I think that is made up, just like the other 83% of statistics.
I programmed for a living before I retired and this is not hard to build a “bot”. Using most C like languages it easy to find the target ads and artificially click them. The programmer simply adds “… the return key…” and “…a timer…” to simulate human interaction. However most of us who programmed are not crooks so we would not do it…
Most citizens aren't Communists, yet we have one for our president. Only takes a few rotten apples......
AdBlock is a help but only works on some of it. It blocked 79 on 9News this morning and so far 25 on ZH but I still get a site pop-up when hitting the arrows here or when hitting the link to follow a story on other news sites.
ZH
add noscript or ghostery, it will take care of the rest. A lot runs from scripts & those scripts are blocked unless you approve them manually.
Fark! It's all a fraud!! The only real thing in the matrix, is you the Soul you are. You the spiritual being is manipulated and controlled by all the mechanisims of FEAR!
Ask, what kind of shocking event(s) can happen to cause serious drops in the America's gdp? What will the babylonians do to 'put' everything into an upside down state of chaos and disaster to save the dinosaur paradigm of oil dependence?
Hummmm....
One can wonder, why is the price of oil going down? Ask the rothchilian hydra. Might is could be for the reason that the bric countries are going to the new gold-backed currency system on the first of the new year? Is it because they know the demand for oil has slid to record lows and continues on this never ending down slope?
More so, is it because all this horse-hocky-ring-around-the-rosie BS they are trying and all the fake market manipulations are NOT going to save ANY of the worthless paper currencies? Will the new gold backed Yaun and Russian Rubble BE the new world reserve currency after the first of the year? You bet it will be, and THIS is what Sir Putin knows.
Gives one cause to pause and wonder, will these evil bankster things allow that to happen? Hummm....we must all be DOING all we can do to stave off the beast and the coming false flag events that will be the last ditch efforts to save the rothschillian bankster system of evil money-god manipulations. Something wicked comes in January, or February. Start looking at the dates they love to terrorize so much on, like Feb 2, and the 22nd. Prepare for a power outage and take down of the Internet using any excuse, false flag event, or paid stooge terrorism. Remember, EVERY SINGLE TERROR EVENT OR NEGATIVE DISASTROUS EVENT HAPPENS BECAUSE THE BANKSTERS SPONSORED AND PAID FOR IT TO HAPPEN. ALL HORRIBLE EVENTS ARE GOVT SPONSORED AND CONTRIVED FOR THE GAINS OF THE GLOBALIST SHAT THAT OWNS THE MONEY-GOD.
Everybody on board needs to KNOW, the roithschilds control all the eastern oil(saudi puppets) and the rockofelers control ALL the western oil. Stop whacking at the branches and wasting your vital life force on the finger pointing at any of the glove puppets that cater to these beasts. If any one wants to bitch about the controlled and corrupted world systems, go straight to the top and whack at the horrid hydra heads of these two forks of the snakes tongue.
Here for edumacational purposes is the list of banks these evil things control. Ask, who kow-toes to the money god on a regular basis for survival? Who kisses the beasts arse ritually every day?
http://humansarefree.com/2013/11/complete-list-of-banks-ownedcontrolled.html
Extra credit. What are margin calls?
http://investmentwatchblog.com/emerging-markets-unraveling-is-the-us-going-for-broke-or-just-stupid/
Research:
http://humansarefree.com/2011/09/history-of-house-of-rothschild-complete...
http://humansarefree.com/2011/09/history-of-house-of-rothschild-complete...
http://humansarefree.com/2011/02/everything-about-rothschild-zionism.html
http://humansarefree.com/2013/11/rothschild-banking-empire-valued-at-100...
I didn't know that advertising revenues were so large. I never see an ad anywhere when I visit these sites. Like Facebook, never seen an ad, Twitter, never seen an ad. Years ago someone on Mish's site, which became an ad farm nearly impossible to read his blog at one point, turned me on to "Firefox with ad block enabled." He was right to advise this approach, because ADP in Firefox swept away advertising, to the point I forgot that blogs and the like have advertising. Anways, maybe other browsers have ad block now too, I have not strayed from the one I have which kills off all these ads.
Agreed Firefox with Adblock is the ONLY way to fly also turn off the options for running multiple tabs right click links and then select open in new tab
How's this for fraud everyone working in the financial sectors here at ZH start applying for jobs at JPM and GS infiltrate the rats burrows and take the bastards down from the inside... In three + years of lurking around here I.ve never heard mention of this...hmmm sounds like a good idea to me and damn sure I'd be trying to get on the "inside" had I the creds in the "industry"...now get to work you bean counters and market wizz's.. oh and don't cry about morals and such ..as we all know that shits a cop out...infiltrate I say, stop being the side line victim and start fucking these morons the way they are fucking us. Either that or someone just carpet bomb wall st.. my ideas more feasable and less bloddy. Make's "financial terrowism" sound respectfull now don't it ! ;)
My question is ok, so how much more are they saving from when they paid through the nose to advertise in print and 99% of the readers still didn't give a fuck about their ad?
Bot Bomb Bubble
Ok there's a video of a physicist, Sean Gourley who also owns a technology company and he explains why on Facebook and other social networks that the bot is valued at $100. Mere humans are worth 1-2 cents and are only around to do the work the automated bots can't do..like add content to feed the bots, and thus this story makes perfect sense.
He talks about algorithms that comes out to get us, who's are they and do we benefit.
http://ducknetweb.blogspot.de/2014/03/algorithms-that-exploit-sean-gourl...
I see bots coming to my blog all the time to index and yes the traffic has grown tremendously in the last 6 months...the bots that is. You can't even block them anymore. I used to think Amazon bots were bad but they're nothing compared to this one that runs out of Hong Kong.
Anyway, the video when he explains you are worth 1-2 cents might make some think about what they do on social networks...feed the bots!
This should have been obvious to anyone who looks at internet analytics on a regular basis. I've seen user engagement drop on sites that connect users with 3rd party sites, and traffic increase from those same social networking sites - go figure. Even the third party auditers don't have a clue, the numbers all come out of one system; it's not really something you can audit on a large scale.