How Much Internet Traffic Is Fake? Turns Out, a Lot of It, Actually. (nymag.com) 130
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."
Adult Check and Contributor (Score:5, Insightful)
Why can't the operators of these servers join a multi-publisher subscription network? Two decades ago, such a network called Adult Check was popular, founded on the principle that adults can pay for nice things. One $10/mo payment bought access to all sites that took Adult Check, and the network paid publishers per page view. This helped to alleviate the sticker shock from each website charging a separate subscription.
More recently, Google Contributor could have been that network. The biggest problem with Contributor is lack of privacy, as it shares a parent company with AdSense and DoubleClick. This means Google can use page history gathered through Contributor to infer interests of a Contributor user for use on sites using Google adtech.
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I sent you a message via your website. Let me know if you don't get it for some reason.
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Yeah, they might be staffed by SJW's instead of moderates.
Oh, wait...
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I was one of the few who really like Google Contributor. It allowed me to give back to the websites I frequent in a really convenient way. I was pretty bummed when they shut it down.
Note: I didn't do it to remove ads (ads don't bother me) I just liked that I could directly compensate the websites I use all day...
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I was one of the few who really like Google Contributor. It allowed me to give back to the websites I frequent in a really convenient way. I was pretty bummed when they shut it down.
Contributor appears to still be in operation [google.com], at least in my part of the United States.
Apart from the data sharing between Contributor and AdSense/DoubleClick, the other nitpick I have with Contributor is that it bills viewers per page view, not per unique monthly article. This means a reload when a page fails to load is charged at full price, as are cache misses when viewing an article days later or on another device logged into the same Google Account.
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The internet would be a better place without ads. Fake news would mostly disappear, along with a lot of other worse-than-useless sites, only designed to get page views.
Sticker shock (Score:3)
Patreon shares the same incremental sticker shock issue as individual website subscriptions. Just as your New York Times subscription doesn't let you view a Wall Street Journal article that your friend cited to you, viewing a single patron-only article from each of five different publishers on Patreon incurs a charge for an entire month's subscription to each of those five publishers. The a la carte price structure of Contributor and the flat monthly fee of Adult Check avoid(ed) the problem of it being more
Re: Sticker shock (Score:2)
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Patreon is really the latest attempt at that sort of thing, and for a large number of use websites it's turning out to be successful.
It works for the large but decreasing number of sites that Patreon and Patreon's transaction processors approve of. Dissenting content producers can go elsewhere until the transaction processors censor them again.
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Yeah. The only way around that is with bitcoin, which is what Wikileaks did.
After what happened to Patreon competitor Subscribestar discussion about an alternative payment method has picked up but Bitcoin is not suitable. Some other cryptocurrancy may be. The powers that be are not going to allow such a system to become established without a fight and I am not sanguine.
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Re: Ads... and clickbait articles (Score:1)
Some combination of Trump, UBI, random race baiting and global warming posts also.... wait a second, what does /. post now?
Meh (Score:2, Insightful)
Pond scum feeding on pond scum. I'm having a hard time drumming up concern.
Re: Meh (Score:1)
My online company provides a real service to other not-google/fab/twitter companies. All the money pulled out of g/fb/t stock has to go somewhere. I bet a ton of it goes into mine and my company stock and therefore my network rises.
Let em all die. They will not be missed.
Re: Meh (Score:1)
'Some' of these companies are overvalued? Try, *most* of them. With a few exceptions, that is because they are flat-out disingenuous about their operations. That bubble is probably likely. They have no one to blame but their own, greedy, unethical and arrogant selves, and yes, we will all be affected to an extent. Users can blame their laziness and addiction to 'free', and 'fame'. People have been shouting this from rooftops for many years at this point, no one wanted to listen when the situation was more m
Re: Meh (Score:4)
I, for one, would be delighted if it turns out that cyberstalking is not a viable business model.
But of course that assumes Big Brother Google, Faceboot, et al actually make their money from "ads". Whereas many people have long suspected the majority of their revenue comes from selling mass surveillance data to governments and parastate corporations.
Webmasters (Score:1)
Pretty much any webmaster that views their logs regularly can back up this claim.
One of my websites is a property listings portal in a small foreign county and I have more bot traffic on there than all my other websites combined for some reason. I have like 3 million submitted fake data info from bots in the last couple years.
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use mod_security -> detect bad request -> is IP on blacklists and in a country you don't care about -> automatically tarpit IP
you can manually tarpit IP from other bad requests as well while reviewing mod_security logs, a little scripting makes this process quite fast.
Saves a lot of bandwidth and saves on log space.
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The ISP's have many reasons to _host_, if not actively foster false traffic. They are paid on the basis of traffic, and more traffic enhances _their_ market value. It's much like the USPS approach to junk mail, and ISP approaches to spam. The recipients _loathe_ the false traffic. The businesses carrying it try to strike a balance between maximum profit of selling bandwidth, advertising the size of their service, payment for websites, overwhelmed customers abandoning them for services with better filters, a
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The ISP's have many reasons to _host_, if not actively foster false traffic. They are paid on the basis of traffic, and more traffic enhances _their_ market value.
Inefficiency or fraud, it doesn't matter. It's not like extra money is paid to an incinerator. Someone is making money. In this case, the biggest beneficiary is Google. Their stock would crash if fake traffic were completely eliminated. Google not only doesn't have an incentive to eliminate fake traffic. They have a huge (i.e., stock bonuses for executives that make the decisions) motivation to at least preserve and potentially enlarge the fake traffic.
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The best way to identify a real human these days is to look at traffic where ads are blocked.
The answer is to remove anonymous users (Score:1)
No one likes this idea, but this is the answer
Everyone is given a ipv6 block. All your traffic from them comes from this block and can be tracked if needed. You can randomly use any IP from this block as you wish (the block follows you around, is setup after you authenticate. The tech doesn't exist yet, but is simple to do, probably a simple USB key and password system for users) Businesses are treated the same as individuals, their servers also use the business block.
An independent authority knows who the
Fake or satire? (Score:3, Interesting)
Who can tell the difference?
https://twitter.com/TitaniaMcG... [twitter.com]
Titania McGrath can.
Re:Fake or satire? (Score:4, Informative)
Stuff like that is just a bit of silly fun, the problem is more to do with stuff like the fake outrage industry that posts endless videos about people being "triggered" on YouTube. Parody is great, convincing large numbers of people that there is a culture war going on that is in fact entirely manufactured clickbait for your YouTube channel just creates an army of dangerously delusional useful idiots.
It's not fake (Score:2)
If it's labeled AI.
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I can call you Betty
And Betty, when you call me, you can call me Al...
XKCD (Score:5, Funny)
We're getting closer and closer to that XKCD dream life: https://xkcd.com/810/ [xkcd.com]
xkcd #810-like systems haven't really helped (Score:5, Insightful)
The moderation mechanism described in xkcd #810 already resembles that in use on various forums and Q&A sites, such as Slashdot and Stack Overflow.
1. Each newly registered user sees a page of what Stack Overflow calls "review audits". This resembles Slashdot metamoderation: does what the new user sees as constructive align with what established users see as constructive?
2. Anyone who gets most of the review audits correct has posts placed in "awaiting moderation" state. Only established users can see such a post until at least one established user upvotes the post.
3. Once a user is firmly in positive reputation/karma, the user's posts skip the "awaiting moderation" state.
Yet this hasn't led to any artificial intelligence breakthroughs on the part of the spam industry. Instead, I've noticed that spammers on forums.nesdev.com appear to be humans in low-exchange-rate countries. They search for an old post, reword it, start a discussion, and days later edit the post to include off-topic commercial links. A user who isn't paying close attention is unlikely to see this karma whoring for what it is.
Re:xkcd #810-like systems haven't really helped (Score:4, Insightful)
They search for an old post, reword it, start a discussion, and days later edit the post to include off-topic commercial links. A user who isn't paying close attention is unlikely to see this karma whoring for what it is.
It has always bothered me that Slashdot doesn't allow posted to be edited once they are posted. But now I see that this prevents this type of "karma whoring" from happening. You can't add off-topic junk to a post if you can't edit it.
Facebook (Score:5, Interesting)
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).
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Depends on what you consider a "bot." I consider most bookface users to be unsentiant bots.
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Yeah yeah yeah. You’re so smart.
Mobile is where most bot activity is from (Score:3)
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.
I would argue that the other way - because so MCUH of Facebook traffic is from mobile apps, that is where most of the bot activity is likely to be from.
All it takes is an Android user logged into Facebook and some background app can have plenty of likes and other things they don't even see happening...
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Facebook is also not the world’s greatest data gatherer. Not by a long shot. Google is much much bigger.
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> 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.
Whatever makes you think that a fraudulent data stream from a botnet or adware could not forge data from a mobile app?
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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.
How can we be sure of that? Automated app interaction is certainly well supported on Android (for testing purposes) and I assume iOS as well. I don't know if it would be worthwhile, but it is certainly feasible.
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.
If the purpose of the bot is to trigger ad views, why would that not happen?
Sorry? (Score:4, Interesting)
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....
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There's still a bit of a problem: Decisions are being made based on this stuff.
The data is contaminated, and then we don't know where it goes or who's using which information to make decisions, but someone is using it to make some decisions or else no one would be paying for it. So what happens when companies market their products, or politicians make policy decisions, based on that contaminated information?
And don't think they won't. They're all chasing the opinions of a few demographic groups, and the
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Don't care. Nary a tear shed.
Fucking parasites.
Eventually they'll catch on, but for now, One of life's little pleasures is to make it tough as possible for those bottomfeeders to make a buck.
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So what happens when companies market their products, or politicians make policy decisions, based on that contaminated information?
The companies who make decisions based on bad data will be more likely to fail. As for politicians.....can they really be worse than now?
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> The companies who make decisions based on bad data will be more likely to fail
The companies providing the data, selling it, have very little reason to care. They tend to be small, fraudulent operations that _do not care_ what happens as long as they get the first or even second check. Simply because a client fails is not a compelling reason for the next fraudulent company not to avoid the business.
I'm afraid that the "fraud will be forced out of the market by competition" optimism is one of the notable
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I'm afraid that the "fraud will be forced out of the market by competition" optimism is one of the notable errors of Libertarian politics.
Who said that? I said that companies who fall for fraud will go out of business. Learn to read.
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I'm reviewing your words. I see your point better, thank you. Sadly, there is usually another fool ready to pay for well advertised sandwiches.
Re: Sorry? (Score:2)
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The advertisers are probably quite happy about this. It means their crap is overwhelming the real stuff.
It's got the point where everything, even the real stuff, seems fake because the fake imitations are getting better. In fact there is a feedback loop, where real people see the fake people being effective and adopt their methods.
Slashdot is not immune. Sometimes half the posts on a story seem fake, like they were written by bots or copy/paste shills. They probably aren't though, they are mostly real peopl
Sites need ads (Score:3)
The brand that takes out the ads pays for it all.
With more advanced browsers getting the ad to display, work, track is getting more complex.
What can the ad brands do?
Make the browsers and OS more ad friendly.
Make users have to view ads in some nations?
Make the browser show an ad?
Go ahead and guess if I'm surprised. (Score:1)
I hate being right.
Advertising is black magic (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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They know very well what works, it's just that the more effective the technique the more push-back they get for using it.
At the extreme end you have stuff which is simply illegal, then you have stuff which is banned on TV and the more popular web sites. Stuff that browsers block by default (pop-ups and Javascript abuse). Paying influencers to mislead their viewers.
All the time they are looking for new ways to get away with what they know works, and other people are looking for ways to stop them.
Re:Advertising is black magic (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Advertising is black magic (Score:4, Interesting)
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This.
1) Lots of ads for computers and laptops after buying my first one in five years, and won't be buying another until this one is also no longer supported.
2) Tons of ads for cars, despite my wife and me buying two cars in the last year, knowing that we may not be buying another (we're both over 60 and our cars last for >= 15 years...)
3) I am somewhat badly addicted to inexpensive single-board computers, SSDs and D-I-Y electronic supplies and purchase these things regularly. I see surprisingly few ads
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Clearly, most people who bought a lawnmower have also bought a lawnmower, so you should show them ads of your lawnmower.
Brave Browser (Score:1, Informative)
Please look into the Brave browser which blocks advertisements and trackers by default, it is also implementing a system whereby people get paid to opt-in to watching advertisements. Also, the content creator will get a larger percentage of the advertising revenue as it is not siphoned off by middlemen. You can also tip people directly through the browser.
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Fake content and fake metrics? Fake WTF. (Score:2)
So this must be the fake news about all of the fakery that data mines and advertisers splash around like pigs in poop. Oh, horrors! liars and parasites are everywhere.
This is good (Score:5, Insightful)
There's an apocryphal story that after the end of the Cold War, a bunch of the CIA and KGB got together for drinks. The CIA spooks lamented that theirs had been the harder job. The Soviet Union was such a closed society and had so many restrictions on travel that it was virtually impossible for the CIA to get a spy in there, whereas all the KGB had to do was drive to a town next to a military base and mingle with staff from the base eating lunch there. The KGB spooks disagreed and claimed that theirs had been the harder job. The U.S. produced so much information that it was virtually impossible for them to separate out fact from fiction. If the National Enquirer ran a story about the military working on a, or some conspiracy theorist reported the military was controlling their brain waves with weather balloons, they had to devote resources to figure out if the stories were real or fake.
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To get rid of the panopticon, we need to find some other source of revenue. At the moment there is no way to guarantee that if you pay for services you will no longer be tracked, so we are in a sort of latch-up.
"Agency" activities... (Score:2)
I'm wondering whether you would be willing to comment on the idea of "coopetition" in the TLA world. Having heard of the value of occasional human judgment in certain situations (Cuban missile crisis, a few launch warnings in the '80s, etc.)
I am curious about whether the operators were generally trying to hold the shit together without going too badly sideways, or was the competition among the on-the-ground operators much more hard-played?
Still better than TV (Score:2)
Shitty metrics are better than no metrics at all. That's why online advertising will continue eat TV and newspaper ad revenues.
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I worked in ads at Google. _Every_ ad served by Google has metrics on it. It might not be clicks (brand advertisers often don't care about that, they just want to saturate the page), but there are metrics. I.e. whether it was in the viewport of the browser, etc. TV and newspaper ads don't have any metrics at all.
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Embrace progress (Score:1)
We created machines to get rid of the most mechanical and tedious activities. I will gladly leave it to robots to look and click at ads on my behalf. Let's also teach robots to do the "I'm not a robot" routine, so we humans become free to do meaningful stuff instead.
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My Take (Score:2)
Not All Bots Are Bad (Score:2)
> 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.
I frequently visit Web pages that are bot-generated. Among them are price quotes for stocks, daily weather data (rainfall, temperature, wind speed, etc), and what checks have cleared my checking account. These are not human-generated.
The problem is with bots that visit Web sites. Even there, not all bots are bad. After all, wit