Clicks or Click Fraud?
Check out animation about millions of bots clicks show at Bit.ly as "statistics"
Twitter: The Dark Side Study
- EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
- INTRO to SOCIAL NETWORKING
- Human Society as Social Medium
- Networking at the Speed of Light
- Man I Need Coffee so Bad
- WELCOME to REAL-TIME WORLD
- The First Tweet?
- Businesses Emerge
- CLICK FRAUD - THE DARK SIDE
- URL Shortener
- Bit.ly’s Vulnerabilities
- Bit.ly – Twitter’s choice
- Tricky Analytics
- Twitter's ECO Footprint
- Are We Getting Stupider?
- Twitter Frenzy
- What Kind of Future with Twitter?
- EXPERIMENTS - Bit.ly Validity
- BOTS vs. HUMANS ratio
- BOTS vs. HUMANS by AdSense
- Insight Into Followers
- Bots Folllowing Bots Following Bots
- Christians Following Porn Bots
- Celebrities - Bots of the Worst Kind
- Celebrity Poluters
- Obama Girl?
- Direct Messaging Value
- MILLION CLICKS - ZERO HUMANS
- CONCLUSION
- Appendices
- BOTS vs. HUMANS IPA Analysis 1
- Followers Breakdown
- BOTS vs. HUMANS IPA Analysis 2
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Twitter: The Dark Side | Bit.ly’s BOTS vs. HUMANS Clicks Ratio
The purpose of this experiment was to compare Bit.ly’s analytics data with our own URL shortener and AdSense data from the blog used in the Experiment. We used a classical music blog at http://operalady.blogspot.com/ where we had AdSense analytics installed and a Twitter account of our friend, a young lady named Lorenza Bladuzzi @ http://twitter.com/LaQuotidienne who also writes the Opera Lady Blog.
We used LadyQ’s blog entries and created various short links for her blog entries. For example for Blog Entry:
The Queen of Night aria from The Magic Flute whose long URL is:
http://operalady.blogspot.com/2009/07/mozart-god-of-music-queen-of-night-aria.html
we created three (3) Bit.ly short URLs:
http://bit.ly/ladyq2 (these three Bit.lys created aggregate link bit.ly/GuHDd)
and
two Dac.im short URLs for the same long:
We ran our own bot, created for this experiment, and tweeted on LadyQ’s Twitter account for about 13 days, and during that period we’ve posted 845 tweets.
For that time Bit.ly registered an aggregate number of 2,852 total clicks on all LadyQ’s tweets. Dac.im registered a total of 3,449 clicks. Compare these data with AdSense Analytics:
Date |
Channel |
Impres. |
Clicks |
Page CTR |
Page eCPM |
9/14/2009 |
LadyQ’s Blog |
37 |
0 |
0.00% |
0.15 |
9/15/2009 |
LadyQ’s Blog |
23 |
1 |
4.35% |
0.55 |
9/16/2009 |
LadyQ’s Blog |
21 |
1 |
4.76% |
10.01 |
9/17/2009 |
LadyQ’s Blog |
22 |
1 |
4.55% |
2.22 |
9/18/2009 |
LadyQ’s Blog |
31 |
0 |
0.00% |
0.22 |
9/19/2009 |
LadyQ’s Blog |
27 |
0 |
0.00% |
0.12 |
9/20/2009 |
LadyQ’s Blog |
40 |
0 |
0.00% |
0.1 |
9/21/2009 |
LadyQ’s Blog |
21 |
0 |
0.00% |
0 |
9/22/2009 |
LadyQ’s Blog |
17 |
0 |
0.00% |
0.17 |
9/23/2009 |
LadyQ’s Blog |
21 |
0 |
0.00% |
0.22 |
9/24/2009 |
LadyQ’s Blog |
15 |
0 |
0.00% |
0 |
9/25/2009 |
LadyQ’s Blog |
16 |
1 |
6.25% |
6.9 |
9/26/2009 |
LadyQ’s Blog |
22 |
2 |
9.09% |
10.4 |
Totals |
|
313 |
6 |
|
|
Averages |
|
24 |
0 |
1.92% |
2.04 |
It is important to note that LadyQ – in comparable 13 days period before the Experiment, from September 1, 2009 to September 14, 2009 had an average of twenty (20) Page Impressions on AdSense per day so we assumed the same number of natural organic traffic during the project that leaves us with four (4) page impressions for a day, coming from Twitter.
The results coming from this Experiment are even worse than in the previous one.
Out of 2,852 clicks coming from all Bit.ly links created for this Experiment only 52 or 1.82% are to be assumed came from humans and staggering – even for Bit.ly’s erroneous, misleading statistics – 98.18% clicks presumably came from bots.
Imagine poor LadyQ and her disappointment. Twitter’s trusted URL shortener of choice, a fabled Bit.ly praised for its statistics and awashed in recent $10,000,000.00 venture capital investment told her she had 2,852 clicks on her blog entries, that her efforts have created new visitors, new friends, new followers, new readers when the truth as quite the opposite.
Her tweeting was like yelling in the middle of an Ocean, with no one to hear. How many advertisers and marketers, bloggers and twitters are also being deceived by egregiously exaggerated Bit.ly’s so-called “statistics”.
However, even these 52 “human” clicks LadyQ presumably received from Bit’ly have created a small slew of new followers. When we started this experiment LadyQ had 81 followers and 118 when it ended ergo 37 new followers appeared in her life. And as we all know, Twitter, as a Social Network is all about followers.
PART XV: TWITTER, The Dark Side - Insight Into Followers.
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