So how much of the web traffic is real, and how much is fake? A new article by at NY Mag points out studies generally suggest that less than 60 percent of web traffic is real. Furthermore, it can be questioned how much of the "human" traffic is real, which poses interesting questions on how traffic should really be measured. Check the full piece for more info.
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.”