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Re:61.5% of Web Traffic Is Not Human by ChrisNorstrom on Saturday December 14, 2013 @09:14PM (#6908034)
On my blogs I used to use a script that banned bad bots by adding their IP to a list on my .htaccess file. Until it crashed the banning script by adding over 5,000 IPs of bad bots in just 1 month. If my google analytics numbers were correct I'd say between 50% and 70% of my traffic were bots. So 61.5% sounds about right.

I've pretty much stopped looking at "number of impressions" when purchasing advertising too. It's always untrue. A recent blog I was going to advertise on said it had 35,000 unique visitors a month. But yet just a few weeks ago they had a "free give away contest for a jewelry brand (no purchase necessary, international readers allowed, free to apply, no shipping costs)" and only 100 people applied. That pretty much said it right there.

One more example: A site I was on allowed unregistered visitors to give their entire collection of corporate logos a rating between 1 and 10 stars. And they used radio buttons to vote for the numbers 1-10. As soon as you select a radio button it auto-submits and gives the logo that rating. EVERY SINGLE LOGO had a massive number of "1 star" ratings because all the bots would see a radio button, check it, and trigger the vote. All the logos on their site had a rating of 1.

Re:61.5% of Web Traffic Is Not Human by viraptor on Saturday December 14, 2013 @09:52PM (#6908156)
> "free give away contest for a jewelry brand (no purchase necessary, international readers allowed, free to apply, no shipping costs)"

The internet conditioned me to ignore such claims as too-good-to-be-true. I would expect loads of people to treat it like "you're the 1000000th visitor! you won!" and other "free stuff here (if you register and fill out hundreds of forms)" offers.

Re:61.5% of Web Traffic Is Not Human by ChrisNorstrom on Sunday December 15, 2013 @04:45AM (#6908885)
Na, it was a very personal blog and the owner does things like that all the time. The name of the jeweler was disclosed and everything. I get what you're saying though, but it was legit.