The answer is 10 percent, according to a new 20 month study from web ad company Solve Media. Ten percent of all online traffic comes courtesy of bots, not humans. Which is mostly interesting in that not only is it not terribly surprising (particularly if you’ve spent much time maintaining a website comment system) but it actually seems kind of low. Note that bots here are pieces of software designed to do things like register fake accounts, click ads, and leave nonsense comments, like “great site, might you like skin care product here OK” (not so much things like Reddit’s fake account seeding but, rather, the bots that keep Facebook’s goofy ads in business).So, 10 percent is whatever and the cost of doing business in an automated environment but, more interesting, is the rate of increase. This is what Solve Media, whose business involves making ads for CAPCHA systems (thus naturally having an intense interest in the human vs. bot subject), claims on its site in a post presumably written by a human being: “Since 2011, Solve Media has witnessed a 400 percent rise in aberrant traffic across registration, voting, commenting and contact services on the web.”Now that is something to consider. Ten percent today, yes, but given another couple of years, what could the rise of the commenter machines mean for day-to-day life on the internet? If, say, a full third of all internet traffic is bots, does that begin to affect not just your regular ol’ experience of the web, but how you perceive and value it? Presumably we can keep up and minimize the bot impact, but one also imagines an increasingly worthless world of content dictated by ad flows dictated by not web consumers, but bots. Evolution suggests we won’t stand for it.
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