Nieman Foundation at Harvard
HOME
          
LATEST STORY
Media owners in the crosshairs as Trump craves retribution
ABOUT                    SUBSCRIBE
Oct. 2, 2013, 1:27 p.m.
LINK: online.wsj.com  ➚   |   Posted by: Caroline O'Donovan   |   October 2, 2013

“Unique visitors” aren’t always that unique. Sometimes, they’re not even visitors — at least of the human variety. A story in The Wall Street Journal looks at what happens marketers end up buying ad space on websites that turn out to be visited only by robots.

While some scammers create stand-alone operations, others devise sprawling empires. In one case, the White Ops technology uncovered a zombie-populated lifestyle network, with hundreds of connected sites, including bodybuildingfaq.com, financestalk.com, and abctraveling.com. No one at the sites could be reached for comment.

In some scenarios, legitimate websites inadvertently set themselves up for botnet invasions when they hire companies to help boost their traffic. That can involve building audiences through methods such as paid keyword-search advertising with search engines.

White Ops discovered that more than 30% of the visitors to the education portal Education.com were robots. In the past month the site received about four million unique views, according to Quantcast.

A spokesman for Education.com said it was aware of the bot-traffic and that it had likely come from an initiative in the summer to boost its audience numbers. Education.com had bought traffic from a variety of legitimate sources, including search engines, to lure in new subscribers, as well as users “who would perform well for advertisers.”

“We shut down the program,” the spokesman said.

Show tags
 
Join the 60,000 who get the freshest future-of-journalism news in our daily email.
Media owners in the crosshairs as Trump craves retribution
“The big difference now is that Trump’s anti-press tirades are also campaign promises. The words of Trump’s first term will translate to actions in a second term.”
TV rewards the authoritarian candidate
“We will not learn who the best person for the job of the presidency actually is, but we might come away from campaign coverage knowing who the best person is to play president on TV.”
Newsrooms (re)discover the magic of project management
“Strong project management makes newsrooms more adaptable and more able to survive industry turmoil.”