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The majority of traffic from Elon Musk's X may have been fake during the Super Bowl, report suggests (mashable.com)

submitted 6 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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These numbers are legitimately shocking.

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[–] atzanteol 3 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Why do bots click ads?

[–] InEnduringGrowStrong 8 points 6 months ago (1 children)

I think the implication is some of these bots are meant to make twitter are used to fake twitter's engagement numbers.
When they pitch to a customer (to sell ad space), it looks good on paper.
Then they but ad space, but fail to convert anything from it because it's just bots.
TL;DR: Twitter is kinda scamming advertisers

[–] atzanteol 1 points 6 months ago (1 children)

The article kinda dances around that.

But then it's implying that all the other sites do it too, just less?

Slightly more than 2.8 percent of the 306 million visits sent from TikTok were determined to be fake. Out of the 90 million visits that came from Facebook, a bit more than 2 percent were fake. And Instagram's traffic was only 0.96 percent fake, based on 749,000 visits.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Yes this is pretty normal stuff. Bots are inevitable. But 75% of traffic is absurd.

[–] atzanteol 1 points 6 months ago (1 children)

But bots are typically posting propaganda and spam. Why would they be clicking on ads and driving traffic to other sites?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

A bot account is wasting impressions (the thing appears on your feed regardless if you interact with it - that’s an impression). Those are part of advertising budgets and impact your ROI on ad dollars, not just clicking through. Which means people are getting fewer click through per impression, which means they are wasting money putting their ads/sponsored content in front of non-people who are never going to click through. Edit: This also potentially messes with any data they are getting about their audiences such as demo and location given the sheer scale.

Imagine you pay for a billboard that is priced because of how many cars drive past it only to find out that 75% of the cars are self driving deliveries with no passengers.

[–] atzanteol 2 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Ah - shit I completely missed that it was "impressions" being fraudulent not "clicks". Thanks!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

Happy to help! Yeah they’re basically saying “we had 100 people come see your store!” and it was really only 25, meaning it severely diluted the value of impressions for advertisers.