{"id":498,"date":"2013-04-05T13:16:19","date_gmt":"2013-04-05T18:16:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/tim.mcguinn.es\/s\/?p=498"},"modified":"2015-07-23T01:18:53","modified_gmt":"2015-07-23T01:18:53","slug":"498","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/tim.mcguinn.es\/s\/?p=498","title":{"rendered":"Bot Traffic Is Out There, But Where?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"ChameleonAn Adweek<\/a> story from early last week about bad internet traffic caught my eye, and before I could write up a post they followed it up with a little more detail. Unfortunately the outcome is less on detail and more on \u201cwe know something is up, but can\u2019t figure it out.\u201d<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve shared this same frustration in the past where I was working on a project and we decided step was to increase traffic by buying traffic through some networks that do this sort of arbitrage work.<\/p>\n

These stories first center around some \u201csuspect\u201d content networks that are being credited with millions of page views a month. Good for them? Well the issue is that they really are not very sites and the fact that they are related though a central publishing group makes you question are there really users going to the site and generating clicks.<\/p>\n

The problem that crosses the line is when these page views generate millions of page view X multiple ad units per page. When these numbers get tallied the revenue estimates for these sites again reach into the $millions.<\/p>\n

Here are the stories:<\/p>\n