Ran across this article detailing the makeup of the average website traffic. Even realizing that a decent number of bots are ‘good bots’ – i.e. Googlebot or Bingbot content crawlers, the article doesn’t quite make the point that in advertising platforms and paid traffic campaigns, bots (completely useless at that) are still a huge problem and advertisers are paying for a lot of traffic that doesn’t exist. The fact that the ecosystem is set up to work this way (artificially low prices in some cases, definitely inflated traffic numbers in many others) still doesn’t excuse the fact that for newcomers into the space, it’s an extremely difficult read to get an accurate handle on how well the traffic that’s sometimes very dearly bought should behave.
Humans Make Up Less Than 40 Percent of the Internet’s Traffic
http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/humans-make-40-percent-internets-traffic/story?id=21206904