You. Yes, you. Are you an actual human?
It’s not an entirely unreasonable question to ask because the odds of a human reading these words is about one in three. You see, two-thirds of traffic on the internet is comprised of bots, according to analysis by security vendor Barracuda Networks.
What are these bots doing? Many are cruising the web indexing web pages, making it easier to find content. Others are doing “bad bot” things like trying to hack into sites. Yet more are clicking on ads.
It’s those ad-clicking bots that are a symptom of the problem plaguing media today. Click fraud is profitable because clicks generate payouts from ad networks. But as the volume of traffic surges, the value of each click falls. So the scale of traffic required to support actual journalism and publishing becomes ever larger.
The ad-fraud researcher Augustine Fou has a great chart titled “Not Humans, Something Else.” It plots the total number of internet users in the U.S. since 2004 against annual digital ad spending. Ad spend rockets upwards and to the right, far outpacing the number of internet users. To whom are advertisers showing all those ads? Probably bots.
Continue reading: https://www.coindesk.com/layer2/2022/04/05/web-3-and-the-rise-of-small-media/?outputType=amp
It’s not an entirely unreasonable question to ask because the odds of a human reading these words is about one in three. You see, two-thirds of traffic on the internet is comprised of bots, according to analysis by security vendor Barracuda Networks.
What are these bots doing? Many are cruising the web indexing web pages, making it easier to find content. Others are doing “bad bot” things like trying to hack into sites. Yet more are clicking on ads.
It’s those ad-clicking bots that are a symptom of the problem plaguing media today. Click fraud is profitable because clicks generate payouts from ad networks. But as the volume of traffic surges, the value of each click falls. So the scale of traffic required to support actual journalism and publishing becomes ever larger.
The ad-fraud researcher Augustine Fou has a great chart titled “Not Humans, Something Else.” It plots the total number of internet users in the U.S. since 2004 against annual digital ad spending. Ad spend rockets upwards and to the right, far outpacing the number of internet users. To whom are advertisers showing all those ads? Probably bots.
Continue reading: https://www.coindesk.com/layer2/2022/04/05/web-3-and-the-rise-of-small-media/?outputType=amp
